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0408

A Designer Prepares: Experiments in Method Design

by Lawrence Kasser

Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 11, 1973in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degreeof Master of Architecture.

An alternative or supplementary design method is explored wherebythe designer seeks to use a "literary" rendition or hypothesis ofthe client's needs to provide the basis for his design.

Part One outlines the problems the author sees in current designpractice and suggets what types of steps could be taken to over-come them. An experience with the making of a biographical filmdocumentary is described as one source of the author's inspirationfor the present experiments.

Part Two tries to experiment with the "literary" method on onecategory of design problem: the evaluation and modification of aset of design drawings as yet unbuilt. Two fictional charactersare invented and their movements and impressions to their hypo-thetical environment are described so that some design responsecan be made to them. Visual and written ideas and comments arefound in the margins.

The conclusion evaluates the experiment and prjects other possibleuses and variations of the technique. Further, the author's ownproblems in attempting the technique are.described.

Thesis Supervisor: Gary A. Hack

Title: Assistant Professor of Urban Studies

Introduction

This thesis consists of a number of different parts. The

general theme running through them is stated explicitly by the

title, "A Designer Prepares". The thesis intends to tell how I

prepared and still am preparing myself to design physical environ-

ments as a professional career. As this introduction is being

written well after most of the body of the text, I can see how

well this intention has been carried out. And now, two themes,

instead of one, seemed to have emerged. First, much has come out

expressing the original idea: how I got to where I am as a designer

and how what got me here can get me elsewhere. This topic is very

important to me as a summary or statement of what I got out of

four years of design school. Although not meant to be a sequence

of course descriptions, this thesis has come to represent a sort

of diary about how I related my school learning to an on-going

real-life situation. In this somewhat parochial concern, there may

be value to others for I have seen few accounts of how a designer

evolved step-by-step in his or her personal design philosophy, esp-

ecially accounts which actually get down to nuts and bolts kinds

of descriptions. And this saga of the real-life encounter between

learning and the application of it has had an interesting effect on

me. For I have come to feel that this learning from experience con-

sists mainly in learning to have confidence in the relevance and

value of one's own observations whether or not they appear to have

some specific relevance the time they are made. Freeing up an abil-

ity to hazard a guess at the reasons that underlie the quality or

feeling of a once seen place or lifestyle and then perhaps to reject

or modify that hypothesis - it is this ability which can make inno-

vation in design meaningful and not arbitrary or whimsical.

Some of these thoughts may have a ring to them of anti-intellec-

tualistic rebuke at the rational or scholarly communication of

design technique. The academic side has its place, I believe,

but really good design in the sense of "good fit" or "right feel"

springs mainly from inner transmutation of personal experience

and insight. Which, as I hope to outline, is not such a difficult

method or practice to cultivate. A general perception these days

is that it rarely pays to accept someone else's version of what

one's life should be like, at least not openly. In the same way,

one should not accept for himself a substitute generated from

another's life experience or hangups for a personal design philo-

sophy. About seventy pages from here into the thesis, I describe

at some length a dream. It is not a dream which I, myself, had, but

one of a ficticious character invented by me to unearth some infor-

mation previously hidden from me. More on the hidden information later.

The dream describes in great detail a musical instrument invented

by our technology. The instrument is so easy and convenient to use

for the imitation of pop music that it has become useless as any

sort of vehicle for personal expression. Whatever makes Muzak easy

to listen to or easy to ignore also renders it a shadow of any ser-

ious music of any style or of any age. For Muzak neither satisfies,

elucidates, nor excites; it is but a filler of void - not silence -

but void. In a similar manner, I think that many young designers

tend to see their education, formal or otherwise, as a filler of a

void of ignorance. To an extent, that may be true if one is speaking

of an ignorance of specific techniques, or of standard operating pro-

cedures, or of shortcuts to get from the start of a project quickly

to the finish. But that kind of ignorance further implies to many

that they must also lay in a whole new stock of ideals or values re-

garding what should or should not be the attributes of a well designed

space. I will contend in this thesis that most of us really start

out with a reasonably complete set of criteria and opinions about

what is good or bad about a designed place or physical situation. To

unearth this knowledge, within a context of practicality and a

client's propensities, however, may require some imagination and

effort.

3

0

Thus, I am reminded that I mentioned above that another theme

besides the history of my personal involvement also emerged during

the writing of this thesis. That theme revolves around the need to

develop some technique or series of techniques to bring out these

great funds of stored knowledge most of us bring with us into our

professional years. Unearthing and using this hidden knowledge, and

perhaps generating further insights or combinations - this procedure

when it begins to inform physical design I have chosen to label as,

"Method Design". In another way, then, is generated the title of the

thesis.

Roughly, this is the planned itinerary of the thesis, the

order of some of the points it will stop at and ponder. It will

open with a semi-formal discussion of the kinds of problems existing

between designer and client which I feel I can deal with using

"method design". Then, the technique, itself, is suggested and

described to the extent to which it will be used in this thesis.

In the next section, I seek to look at myself as a "method

designer". Not one by choice, however, as circumstance left me in

a unique position of building a home for myself without benefit

of pre-drawn plans or any particular concept of design. But I do

not plan to exhume all the painful artifacts of growing up which

may or may not have led to the hammering in of this nail here or

two inches over, although some of the ideas or happenings leading

to the structures built in the house will be aired for several

reasons. One is to make a record for myself of that time in my life,

still ongoing, but without its earlier urgency. Another reason is

to indicate to the reader that some physical things which seem so

simple on the surface may if fact have a lot of backround to them;

there may have been changes and mistakes, as many steps backwards

as forwards. And from these perturbations we can extract much knowledge

of the designer's motives. A third purpose to the description or at

least parts of it is to entertain, to lighten a sometimes heavy load

of descriptive detail and dimensions. For this reason, much written

matter peripheral to the actual putting together of the house has

been included but in a reduced single-spaced format. The most impor-

tant purpose to this section is to set the stage for the next one.

By this point, the reader may be convinced that if he or she is a

designer, then they have a readily available source from which to

draw much information of real relevance: their own experience. In my

case, much of that experience has come from the building of a house,

a rather obvious sort experience for a would-be architect. It leaves

me less distance to travel to find relevant design experience to

rely upon when attempting to interpret design needs for persons

other than myself. There are other sources, however, and it is these

for which we will eventually be reaching.

Following the description of the house I built for myself, there

will be a discussion of a film. It is a half-hour piece which I

helped to make during my first year in the design school. It des-

cribes with her own words and movements one person's reactions to

living in an environment totally different from the one in which

she grew up. In the film, she speaks about what parts of her emotional

self she brought with her from a small town in South Dakota in her

pilgrimage to New York City. Some of these parts she found she could

not leave behind and they made life hard for her in the big city.

And some new emotional facets were added by life in the city which

made it impossible for her to return to the small town. So, from the

sensitivities exposed through this dichotomy between the two environ-

ments, much emerged for me to learn. More importantly, from the

point of view of this thesis, much also came out about the style or

method of this type of learning and the communication of it as well

as the content. I am speaking of a kind of story one can tell about

oneself in order to illuminate certain points. If one cannot do it

for some reason, then someone else, in this case the designer, can

tell the story instead. Or invent a reasonable facsimile thereof.

More on this later in the thesis.

Following a brief description and discussion of the film, I begin

a new section of the thesis. It will be cast in a new format, although

it is one which was tried briefly during the descriptive segment on

the building of the house. An experiment will be made here on a new

way to dig out whatever design information which I am hypothesizing

most of us have. The method need not involve the building of houses

or the shooting of sound and color films. It is cheaper, quicker, and,

now that I have tried it out, I think it may be more efficient. And

it gets to the point fast. What I have tried here is to project

through fictional writing those manifestations of another person's

lifestyle which would be directly germane to my attempts to design

for that person. The fictional aspect of my writing is only one possible

variant of the technique. If there were a real-life client involved,

the writing could constitute a more educated scenario as it sought

to project for the designer the relevant parts of his client's

lifestyle. The point is that trying to explicitly articulate some-

thing about this other person's routine, be it daily or otherwise,

ends up forcing me, the designer, to recognize and hopefully get

over some preconceptions about that person's life I might have had.

Further, it enables me to get a better handle on what I will have

designed for him, and how it should be modified to better fit him

rather than fit my own stereotypes or preferences.

It will be noted that these excursions into fictional narra-

tive tend to meander all over the place as far as to which comments

and observations belong to the hypothetical client and which to the

author. Whatever, the comments et al attempt to center about a set

of plans which I drew up several months ago. I am using this tech-

nique of "inhabiting" these plans with fictional beings as an exper-

mental technique with which to unearth some new ideas about how to

change the plans. I want to make them more fitting and responsive

to any real persons who might come to inhabit the three-dimensional

constructed version. As I could not know who, specifically, would

come to live in this place, it might seem as though some of the con-

clusions or changes I have reached are arbitrary ones at best. This

I do not believe. A fundamental tenet of this thesis is that most of

us have a general knowledge of relevant design, but merely lack the

techniques or the discipline to draw it out of ourselves. If, in fact,

7

we do enjoy such a fund of knowledge, in each person similar in

its content though not necessarily in its origin, then most of us

would benefit from an appropriate application of this knowledge.

How, then, can I prove the assertion that there actually is such

deeply and generally held knowledge, and that this knowledge can

even go so far as to inform the activities and thoughts of properly

drawn fictional characters? I think I can prove the point by asking

of my experiment whether through it I have really been able to

uncover new insights. And have these insights been valuble and sub-

stantial enough to make important alterations in the original set

of plans? If the insights emerge, they either they or their pre-

cursors must have been there in the first place.

Accordingly, the fictional section is accompanied by sketches,

notes, and other illustrative memos which I have come up with during

the course of the experiment. They have not yet been translated into

the same hard-line format as the plans which were their basis. But

that next step merely awaits a further expenditure of time. The

technique will already have proven its use.

Finally, the thesis draws to its conclusion. There I will

describe in greater detail the method used in the experiment, including

an evaluation of the results. The conclusion will make further

comment on how valuble I feel this technique might be in other sit-

uations and for other designers. I hope to suggest some variations

on the "method" technique which might be useful under some circum-

stances. Probably readers will think of many others.

That will end the thesis. Here I would like to express my

gratitude to my two faculty advisors of the last eight months for

their substantial investment of time and interest: Gary Hack for

much comment on the content and purpose of the work, itself; and

William Southworth for many discussions on the writing of design

theses in general and the whys and wherefores of this one in par-

ticular. I want to thank also Ms. Lisbeth Shore for her careful

checking of the manuscript and her many and varied remarks on the

quality of the writing. Lastly, I wish to express my great debt

and gratitude to my parents for their continued support and en-

couragement over such a long period and in so many ways.

A Designer Prepares: Experiments in Method Design

Part One

I

Some time ago, I participated in an architectural design re-view whose panel of critics left me with some important issues toponder. At this session, my work was criticized for not havingindicated real walls or partitions in any of my plans. There werelines drawn on the vellum sheets which, I was convinced, actuallydid indicate and represent what they were supposed to have. Butthe persons at this design jury insisted that these lines were,in fact, nothing but that: lines, and more lines. Since then, Ihave often wondered what set of qualities made the difference to

them between putting down mere lines and drawing real walls. Instead

of my one single thick line, maybe I should have drafted a doubleset of thinner ones. This would give any proposed wall or partitiona measureable thickness. Would it help to make a further gesturetoward realism, and thus toward relevance, by adding door and win-dow openings? How about textures? Shadows? On another, perhaps moreabstract scale, would it do very much good to make use of symbolssuch as arrows, letters, tones, or colors? To what extent would any

or all of these techniques reveal whatever "true" design implica-

tions were inherent in placing this wall, here, now?

Suppose some of the above techniques could lead a hypothetical

client to a better understanding of what the designer had in mind

when he drew the plans. Goinq over them, the designer and his clientcould try to measure or determine the kind of experience one would

A0

have in the finished structure. A basic issue they would determine

is whether the building would continue to stand. Next, following

the usual list, would be to judge whether the design would assure

sufficient access or ease of circulation. Where and when would sun-

light fall in such and such a location? As to furniture, could it

be placed in useful, comfortable, or workable configurations? By

juggling the various plans and superimposing overlays, the designer

and his client could investigate many different problems. They

could draw into the plans minature people with corresponding pieces

of furniture in an effort to occupy the proposed spaces, thus

attempting to illuminate other issues. To flesh-out the unbuilt

structure even further, they could make a model of it in cardboard

or plastic. The next logical step might be to construct a full-scale

mock-up of some part of the scheme. In this way, many new facets

could be surveyed in conjunction with one another: how typical

furniture placements would conceal or emphasize certain construction

details, for instance; how entering a room from a given direction

would obscure some important feature of the space, etc., etc.

However, studying a drawn plan, or viewing a model, or walking

through a three-dimensional mock-up can deal only with part of the

problem. For we would come away from these experiences with only

partial information heavily related to the means of representation

we had just used. Our experience would not have given us an overall

picture or feeling of what it would be like to live in the place.

Perhaps, if there were some way we could actually come to inhabit

the mock-up, we might get a more realistic idea of the kinds and

quality of living conditions our plans have implied.

The notion of "inhabiting" in turn leads to more questions about

what we mean by "experience". Are we, for instance, going to be

interested in defining our experiences while trying to sleep in the

new structure? Will our activities there be ones that repeat them-

selves routinely, or is each a unique event? Will we be moving

through the building as we experience it or standing still? Perhaps

very personal concerns may influence our perceptions and should

therefore be taken into account: will we be sleepy or awake? Hun-

gry or satisfied? Happy or sad? Are we to be alone or with others?

And, if with others, will they be friends, or family members, or

perfect strangers? Money may enter the picture: will we be paying

the heat bill or will the landlord? Etc., etc. In sum, how can we

possibly predict what the totality of life could be like within an

unbuilt building or environment? And we need not limit our questions

to those pertaining to being inside. What conditions will prevail

outside or surrounding this structure? What effect will be had on

persons who merely see it and have no special business inside? To

even begin an attempt to investigate these concerns, we might end

up "inhabiting" our plan and its environs for a considerable length

of time. Perhaps twenty-four hours; perhaps twenty-four years. Even

then, we might still be asking: was the chosen period of time the

"right" or signifigant period? Was it a weekend or weekday? A time

of employment or unemployment? Winter? Summer? And so on.

There may yet be another whole realm of questions to add to

this growing list: who really constitutes the character so blithely

referred to as, "we"? Is it, "we, the designers", "we, the eventual

occupants", or, "we, the two of them together"? Further, can or

should the two identities of designer and occupant have reasonably

similar conceptions of what they value, what the design issues are,

and what means there are to cope with them? The two roles might co-

incide if the designer and the occupant were manifested in the

same person: the designer who built and occupied his own design, or,

the occupant who designed and built for himself. But the number of

times where this is the case is, at best, limited. Assuming that

better, more useful, and more relevant structures might result if

the designer and the user could try out each other's role for a

time, we might do well to explore techniques which make that possible.

.ne analogy useful to considering the problem of inhabiting a

place is how actors seek to put themselves in a completely imaginary

situation and then how they react to it. Constantin Stanislavsky,

the Russian dramatic director and theorist writes about this in,

/2.

An Actor Prepares:

"Every movement you make on the stage, every word youspeak, is the result of the right life of your imagination.

"If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically,without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why,what you want, where you are going, and what you will do whenyou get there, you will be acting without imagination. Thattime, whether it be short or long, will be unreal, and youwill be nothing more than a wound up machine, an automaton.

"If I ask you a perfectly simple question now, 'Is itcold out today?' before you answer, even with a 'yes', or'it's not cold', or 'I didn't notice, you should, in yourimagination, go back into the street and remember how youwalked or rode. You should test your sensations by rememberinghow the people you met were wrapped up, how they turned uptheir collars, how the snow crunched underfoot, and only thencan you answer my question."

These paragraphs suggest some of the techniques which the so-

called "method" actor uses to create a realistic role on the stage.

His purpose is to become for the audience a "real person" other than

himself for a short, explicit, period of time. As the audience, we

must merely be willing to suspend our disbelief for the moment; the

rest of the burden of establishing the fictional identity rests with

the actor. To accomplish his task, he must perform movements and

utterances which are realistic and consistent with one another. Even-

tually, a recognizable pattern evolves on the stage, every gesture

manifesting and further helping to delineate the character. For only

in this way can the audience expand its knowledge of the character's

typical reactions to situations to the point where it can make un-

conscious predictions of his reactions to future circumstances. This

is how an exciting performance can build expectancy and foreboding

into an intense current of dramatic tension.

An important point for us to note here is an underlying impli-

cation in Stanislavsky's thoughts that most persons who become

actors have within them sufficient seeds of any given experience to

recreate and build from that experience on the stage. Picking and

choosing amongst his particular collection of "seeds", the trained

actor will eventually develop a complete and convincing, even if

fictitious, dramatic character.

The typical play yields little detailed backround information

which will help us, the audience to predict with certainty a given

character's future behavior. The time of the action, the setting, and

perhaps certain important past circumstances might be revealed ex-

plicitly in the first scene, but a detailed biographical history

of each character is invariably omitted. Playwrights such as Pinter

thrust us into an unfamiliar scene at the start, forcing us to re-

construct the past from scant clues in the present. Thus, we are

never led to believe that our character will always do thus-or-so

in a given situation just because he or she has always done it be-

fore. In order to become intensely involved with the dramatic action,

we should not be made to labor under a heavy weight of peripheral

data. But we must be able to surmise, or expect, or fear that a cer-

tain character may prevail or be destroyed at the action's climax.

In other words, the actor must feed us enough information about his

stage personality so that we can forsee many possibilities but not

so much as to bore us with certainties. We, ourselves, of course,

must do the rest of the work with our imagination.

One result of making this excursion into dramatic theory is to

marvel at the amount and type of information we can gather in so

short a time about people previously unknown to us. Now, we can ask,

is there a way the physical designer can aquire and use this fund

of information about the lifestyle of a perspective client? He may

begin by picking up clues and patterns from what relationships he

sees existing between the client's current activities and the physi-

cal setting of these activities. The designer realizes that the fu-

ture unfoldings of these relationships will take place in what is as

yet as unbuilt physical environment. Perhaps, then, at this early

momeni in their collaboration, the designer will take aim at a re-

sult of some kind he wants the future environment to bring about. He

may want to encourage a feeling of oneness between his client and

the proposed physical environment. The client would then overcome

any feelings of frustration or alienation which some previous setting

may have caused him. On the other hand, it may be that the process

of developing a relationship with the new environment is, itself,

of great interest to the designer. How can the newly-designed and

-built surroundings be accommodated through the client's explora-

tions? What will happen on day one in the new place, on the second day,

and so on? In this sense, the designer may come to ressemble a

playwright in attempting to orchestrate the course of future events,

liberating along the way elements of his characters which were pre-

viously hidden. And, now much like a conscientious actor, he

searches through many current roles and activities for data on which

to predicate his own on-stage behaviour. To round out this scheme,

we may then consider the client as a theater-goer. We would want

him, through the offices of the trenchant playwright and sensitive

performer to eventually experience in his new and unfolding environment

what the astute drama buff would expect from complex works of

theater.

Many designers might argue that the client has a much more

positive, perhaps even aggressive, role to play during the genera-

tion of a design. Once I wrote a paper suggesting the necessity

of the architect to consider himself the client of his client during

some phases of the design process. In generating the program, for

instance, the architect's single most important source of informa-

tion is his very own client. For, presumably, it is the client alone

who is the final judge of how and whether his needs will be met by

the proposed structure. But there are problems: often no eventual

users are on the scene while the design is being done; or the paying

client may not be the same as those who will use the environment.

Even neglecting this, many clients have a limited view of their own

capabilities and responsibilities. They may either defer to the

archicect's status as a professional or they may never have formulated

any clear list of needs or priorities. Such a client may end his

participation by declaring: "Anyway, the architect knows best; that's

what he's paid for."

In situations like this, the architect must make himself a

good listener and encourage his clients to become good "talkers".

Too often, however, this does not happen. The architect or de-

signer generates the program - whether it be a list of design prior-

ities with square footages or a more generalized, albeit hazy,

impression - by consulting surrogate clients, other professionals,

or merely his own head. Publications like Sweet's Catalogue, Graphic

Standards, professional-society handouts, etc. whose pages seem

to grapple with the universal problems of the universal client do

not always have the same point of view as the solitary person who

originally knocked on the architect's door. No doubt, these sources

have much information to give. But it sometimes seems that by the

amount and precision of such information, they determine and give

emphasis to certain issues, neglecting others where the standards

are less firm or totally non-existant.

What has become of the client in all of this? Since the initial

contact, he has perhaps been in a quiescent phase, more or less

allowing his architect to pick the problems and then determine the

solutions. The two meet up again when the architect returns with the

first schematics and cost estimates. Unfortunately, much of value

may have been lost in the meantime: new insights by either party

could easily have led to alternative definitions of issues, hence

solutions. The effects of these losses will be compounded as the de-

sign process continues.

Thus, the ethical obligation on the part of the designer to

determine and deal with his client's real needs as efficiently and

elegantly as possible may require some change also in the role of

the client. If each party must, in fact, learn from the other, then

the architect, as the professional, should have the techniques at

hand to help bring the contribution of his partner fully up to his

capacity. Unhappily, in too many situations, either the designer

does not have such techniques or the client will not or cannot take

advantage of them. It may be the designer who has not sufficient ex-

pertise or precedent, but, more likely, it will be the client who

balks. Many of them feel too many role "hang-ups" or "put-downs"

to participate equally in a team where the primary obligation of

each partner is honesty and directness in expressing his needs to

the other. To initiate unilateral action may well be the designer's

primary answer to this predicament. The burden to generate an hon-

est and responsive design solution lies with him first for it is

the designer who has the access, motivation, and is paid to learn

any required skills. He is also the one who has the opportunity to

experiment and build uD a repertoire of techniques to deal with

different situations. And, finally, it is the architect who need

not be distracted from these tasks by a totally different web of

concerns which may constitute the life and business of his client.

II

Several pages ago, we left ourselves lamenting the unlikli-

hood of the designer and his client ever being one and the same per-

son. Some paragraphs later, it was also suggested that these two

different persons, even though perhaps joined verbally or legally,

may often be working toward very different ends. Each may have his

own agendum of priorities, perhaps not yet even articulated to him-

self. I would like now to examine two sets of circumstances, both

drawn from my own experience, which may illuminate these possibili-

ties from two opposite viewpoints. First, I will describe some in-

sights generated from the designing and building of my own home.

This, I hope, will serve as an example of the unlikely situation of

the designer coming to inhabit his own designed environment. I will

look at the fit, or lack of it, 'between the predicted environment and

the modes of its eventual inhabitation. Second, I will try to apply

to the problem some insights gained from a biographical film two

others and myself made several years ago in New York City. The film

is about a young woman who moved to the big city from a small town.

/7

She then found herself trying to come to grips with an environment

very unrelated and unrelating to what she brought with her in the

way of emotional expectations. My intention is to examine the

inhabitation process from two opposite viewpoints: where the designer

and the inhabitant are precisely congruent, and where they are

so separate as not to be linked. One theme I hope emerges from this

comparison which relates closely to the point of this thesis. De-

signers have to be able to put themselves in the shoes of their

clients as they design for them. Further, and just as important,

clients must comprehend what kind of environment the designer thinks

he is making for the client as he designs for him.

At this point, let me characterize more clearly the first set

of circumstances alluded to above: when there is a total congruence

between the designer and the client. In this case, the designer

fits perfectly into the shoes of his client for they are walking

around on one and the same pair of feet. I designed, built, and,

off and on, have lived in my own home. During that cyclical process,

I encountered many of the usual limitations to my aspirations: money,

climate, site conditions, none of which were hopelessly restrictive.

Furthermore, the quantity of funds available in the construction

budget at any given time was dependent to a degree on just how badly

I wanted to build or alter some part of the structure. In other

words, it was a question of how far I was willing to allow myself to

go into debt.

Although there were these pressures, they were not as stringent

or inflexible as most encountered in normal designer/client relation-

ships. In fact, one important and obvious pressure was barely felt

at all: time. If something did not get done during the course of

one month, it could wait until the next month, or the next year.

Construction - and design - began in the first week of June, 1968,

and still continue. The fact that construction and design began both at

the same time should point up another unlikely circumstance: there

were no formally drawn plans to speak of during almost the entire

course of the project to date. While it is true that in April of 1971,

I drafted what I considered to be a complete set of detailed foundation

drawings for a major addition, both the concept (formulated in a

hurry) and the details quickly transformed as construction proceeded.

Another unlikely condition - one that occurred often and with

relative casualness - was that structures already in place were re-

moved, replaced, or dramatically altered to fit new schemes that

might suddenly pop up. Parts of floors were ripped up, thus exposing

cavernous openings, only to reappear at different levels or with

different framing systems. Walls were leveled in attempts to make old

small spaces into new grander ones, and vice-versa. Sometimes, it

was a different type or configuration of wall which would replace

its predecessor at almost the same spot as before. One may wonder the

reason for all this seemingly futile or wasteful activity. I can

answer the charge only by saying that the reasons varied. Perhaps

it was a strong need for some new spatial configuration, or perhaps

only that the old was one boring. At other times, it might have been

a friend's chance remark which caused some particular feature to

come or to go. Of items such as windows, doors, stairs, ladders,

shelves, decks, and the like, none held a sacrosanct position. Any

or all were free to disappear entirely or resurface elsewhere. The

operation merely proceeded by my command. Perhaps, better to add:

by my command, and then my labor, possibly assisted by others, and

then sometimes with the help of a local mortgage banker. For all that,

however, the situation was nothing if not flexible. Few preconcep-

tions had to be strictly followed; there were no blueprints, pre-

cise and inalterable, which were drawn long before the day when the

first shovelful of earth came up.

But, small or large, I should not leave the impression that most,

if ar , of my projects were undertaken without some thought behind

them. Many different ideas tried to manifest themselves in some phys-

ical form both inside and outside the house. These experiments, some

less than original, others less than complete, have seemed to lend to

this house an aura of uniquesness. More than once, visitors have re-

marked on this attribute in describing their impressions to me. They

have said things like, "this house feels warm, or or comfortable,

or cozy to me". This remark was made even though the structure is

very large for a house, about 4000 square feet of floor area. Or,

they might have said, "I can really tell what you were into when

you built this place." The basis for these reactions has less to

do with the sometime graciousness of the host than with what the

visitors actually saw or felt.

What I believe they saw was consistency and repetition of many

details and finishes. And contrasted with this consistency, was a

marked specificity of size and orientation of given places through-

out the structure. The observers also felt an empathy with the mo-

tivations behind the designs, although only some of these stemmed

directly from the structural or environmental requirements of the

building. Other motivations no doubt sprang full-blown from person-

al eccentricities of the designer. The point is that whether physical

motifs were designated by function or whim, they still carried much

meaning to the casual, non-professional observer. To repeat, I feel

this is because the motifs were consistent, repeated, and personal-

ized.

(Need I add: the point is NOT that my creations or my creativity

is in some way remarkable; other solutions to other problems by

other designers could have led to similar effects. And it is also

certain that these types of effects are not achieved ONLY by pro-

fessionals.)

No, I think it was the special nature of my situation - its

fluidity and spontaneity - which encouraged these happy results. I

was able to design and build and experience resultant feedback much

more freely and quickly than in the usual case where occunant, de-

signer, and builder are three separate and distinct individuals. True,

not even my own scene was free of its stifling hangups. Not a few

resulted from conflicts between the discipline I was encouraged to

learn in architecture school and the fantasies that kept trying to

express themselves in the field. There were images I wanted to pro-

ject via my work to the surroundinq farm-folk. The substance of these

20

images did not always correspond to the memories I wanted my friends

in Cambridge to take home with them. In sum, given the the multitude

of peripheral considerations at work in this abnormally (sometimes

excessively) fluid situation, one can only imagine how most design

procedures are inhibited by factors seldom related to the best inter- MOpW 6pyOggg- A1

ests of the eventual inhabitant of the building.

I wish it were easier, as I presently write this thesis, to be

more explicit about what were the principal reasons behind any par-

ticular structural change. Obviously, at any given moment, there were

probably numerour factors operating. That finally resulted from them

represented a trade-off between the divergent or conflicting motives

and pressures operating at the time. What I hope to do now is to try

to reconstruct a single episode or sequence involving two oddly

shaped masses of concrete in the rear of the house. The story of

how the masses came to be and what further happened with them is

very brief. It is an easy story to complete. I will follow this

simple "exercise" with one much more lengthy and complicated. The

elements of physical structure involved in this second story under-

went a major renovation just the very day of this writing. For

this latter "tour de force", the saga of the concrete masses is

merely meant to be a warm-up.

There are thirteen cubic yards of the concrete. It is consti-

tuted of cement, sand, and stone, as usual, in the hand-mixed pro-

portion of 1-3-4. At first, these two gray hulks, gray, severe in

line, were meant to serve as foundation piers with several additional,

if unspecified, capabilities. It eventually turned out that only part

of their upper surface areas were needed for taking the weight of

structural columns. Otherwise, the piers could be sat on, lunched on,

or merely stepped on by way of getting somewhere else. Furthermore,

they could still act like a retaining wall, surface water break,

bicycle rack, and all-around ledge to keep objects off the damp earth.

After a while, I saw that I could bolt on a brace to support a

porch deck and then follow this brace up with some kind of ladder to

actually get to the deck.

These events never occurred because the piers became part of

a new foundation wall for an extension to the kitchen. Presently,

one pier constitutes a ledge and stepping platform in its outdoor

phase, a foundation wall as it passes beneath the stud-framed ki-

tchen wall, and a huge concrete block as it rests within the kitchen

interior.This block is presently useful as a seat (more like a throne,

albeit a cold one) or a table top. The outdoor section still func-

tions as a retaining wall and may yet sprout a ladder to an upper

deck. Meanwhile, the other smaller pier is hardly to be seen on

the outside of the building and not at all inside. Its function is

mainly to be part of the relatively new kitchen foundation wall.

Only a small horizontal surface shows outside, its use being to act

as a small ledge for plants or tools.

III

I want to start in now on a discussion of the "wall-zone". Like

the word, "cpncrete", "wall" probably connotes many other meanings

than purely physical ones. There may be a hundred little variations

of meaning for as many different people. One may say that a "wall"

is what surrounds a room; and usually there are four of them for

each room. Another may regard a space of similar size, but he would

not feel "surrounded" like the first, in the sense of being held

captive within a minature stockade of plaster or sheetrock. "Wall",

then, would not be the best word for the second person to describe

whatever physical phenomena limit or define for him this particular

place. To describe a wall that is more than a "wall", I will use

the term, "wall-zone". For me, this represents a tangible thing of

three dimensions, of color,weight, and texture, and perhaps other

physical properties. And, because purpose and motivation may have

changed it through time, one may very well add that the "wall-zone"

OgO COwE7?' /ftWD477ON V4-

2/

may partake of a life as well.

I hope to illustriate this concept of a living "wall-zone" by

reciting a simplified biography of just such a thing, which I feel

exists in my home in Vermont. Older than the concrete piers des-

cribed above, its history also precedes my own in this geographical

area. When I first bought this piece of property in southeastern

Vermont, the whole package consisted only of a small cabin and sixty-

five acres of woods and overgrown meadows. The cabin was about six-

teen feet by twenty-four in plan. It had a simple, gabled, tar-papered

roof. One door, all of six feet in height, was planted squarely in

the center of one of the longer sides. It was about thirty years old

and had gone through some radical changes considering the original

intentions of its builder, Walter Atwood, now deceased. For him and

his buddies, and eventually for his sons and their buddies, the

small shingle-sided structure was meant to serve as a secluded

hunter's camp, approachable only over a rough plank bridge and up

a slippery spring-fed path about two hundred feet into the woods.

Possibly, it was more the muddiness of the path than any severedistance from civilization which gave the camp an air of isolation.For, in fact, Atwood also owned a large home in Bellows Falls, aonce prosperous mill village of some five thousand, located onlyabout six miles from the site of the camp. There, Atwood normallyresided with his sons and wife and three daughters. The second homein the woods, therefore, did not need all the trappings normallyreserved for a real "home away from home". And, since thermal insula-tion was to come only somewhat later, it must have been a chilly ?laceto spend a night during most months of the year. Perhaps he installeda wood stove at some point during his fifteen year tenure. If so,the device was probably lit more to warm up a few men who had gatheredthere to while away a Saturday afternoon downing a couple of cases ofbeer than for any other reason.

This would lead me to the conclusion that the earliest manife-sta-

tion of the "wall-zone" I am trying to describe was, in fact, a non-

existent one; the potential was there, but little else. For this

"wall-zone", whose life I hope to illustrate, would lie almost direct-

ly in the center of the structure. It seems unlikely that any even

mildly convivial part of folks would appreciate a stud-framed barrier

cutting in two what was already their very limited smace. It is also

doubtful whether any such centrally located partition would have

any special structural significance. The long outside walls of the

cabin were kept from spreading under roof and snow weight by a

system of tie-rafters spanning the shorter sixteen foot dimension.

The partition, if there was one at this time, would merely act to

support one of the ties-rafters, thereby adding little support to

the remainder of the twenty-four foot run of the roof's peak line.

Thus, neither structural nor social function would seem to make any

sense of a wall plunked down in the middle of this little cabin.

One concludes, therefore, that there was none.

Then, for a period of five years following Atwood's fifteen,

it seems that nothing new was added or subtracted, except a number

of softwood trees. Ownership of the entire property had passed into

the hands of a woodcutter to whom the hunting camp represented a

convenient place to store his chainsaws, axes, wedges, ropes, other

paraphenalia, and perhaps some beer as well. I know nothing certain

about the man's life-style, but assuming a need for sheltered

workspace to sort out ropes, sharpen blades, etc., I would not

suppose that he, either, had much use for a barrier running through

the center of his workshed.

Now, things begin to happen. A man named Syzch (pronounced 'sitch')

bought the camp and all sixty-five acres in the Spring of 1958. Al-

though he and his family already resided upon three or four acres of

land in rural Connecticut, he acquired this Vermont property to use

as a retreat, selling it to me some ten years later only because

illness in his family forced him to do so. Mr. Syzch immediately

began by insulating the exterior walls and installing first quality

double-hung windows on three sides. Then he sheet-rocked the interior

walls and made a ceiling by hanging more sheet-rock beneath the six-

teen-foot tie-rafters. Following these preliminaries, he began to

set out some actual, discrete living areas within the sixteen by

twenty-four foot space. Some may find it difficult to imaqine how

384 square feet can be sliced into very many usable livinq areas.

$YZC HC CRqvp - / 9

023

Apparently, however, he succeeded. As Syzch, himself, later told me,

during one very long and cold winter, not only his own elderly

parents, but his wife's as well, occupied this little cabin all the

way from the cold nights of December to the cold snows of February.

Looking at the plan of the partitions erected by Mr. Syzch and

appraising the living areas generated therefrom, it is hard to figure

out how they did.

A footnote to this seemingly apocryphal story is that during adifferent winter season, the cabin was broken into by two unknownyoung women. They arrived one December day and did not depart untilthe following February or March. The local observer who reportedthis incident of squatting to Mr. Syzch the following Spring alsonoted that the two had come on foot and they had left on foot. Otherthan this detail, little is known of how the women survived thewinter without a ready source of drinking water (besides meltedsnow), a prepared supply of firewood, or regular access to food.Oh yes, one other mysterious winter visitor comes to mind. A smallblack bear, probably, broke through one of the newly installeddouble-hung windows and rummaged through the pantry shelves insearch of any remaining summer provisions. The visit was discoveredthe next Spring.

Let me bring the story up to 1968, if only temporarily, andmy own entry upon the scene. I had decided during the late winterof that year to buy property in Windham County in the state ofVermont. The reason for choosing this location can be traced to 1964when I lived for some six months in a reconverted 120 year-oldschoolhouse in East Jamaica, more or less in the center of the county.How and why I got there may make for a bried and interesting tale.With two room-mates, like myself temporarily relieving themselves ofcollege pressures, I had taken a large and expensive apartment atopan elegant Beacon Street address in Back Bay, Boston. Although thestatus of the address was inflating, my job - selling Grollierencyclopedias to unwary Northeastern University sophomores - couldnot help pay the rent. Two of us then decided to pick a spot, anyspot, from an Esso roadmap and migrate there in an attempt to get ourthoughts and financial resources into some semblance of order. Thefurther the spot was from Beacon Street, the better, since a brokenlease might be traveling behind us. My room-mate managed to pick anappropriately distant place. He did it while blindfolded. The place:Townshend, Vermont, a place neither of us had ever heard of in a statewhere we had never been. The next Sunday, we drove to an area whichseemed likely to be the place indicated by the microscopic type ofthe roadmap. The fact that we ended up in neighboring East Jamaica,a place not on the map, can be attributed to the efforts of an ambi-tious (and talkative) real estate agent. A good deal was made onthe empty schoolhouse cum ski-chalet because the 1963-64 Vermontski season was unusually slushy and it was more than half over withthe chalet as yet unrented.

This little gray schoolhouse sat on a ridge overlooking awooded valley through which rushed the Wardsboro Creek, eventuallyjoining the West River several miles downstream. The West Riverperambulated down through the county to meet the Connecticut inBrattleboro. The two then slowly waltzed through the states ofMassachusetts and Connecticut, ending with a graceful swirl intoLong Island Sound at New Haven. It was to the region of one of thesources of this grand sarabande that I wanted to return whencircumstances allowed the purchase of land some four years later.

What is so important to me in all this is defining the setting

in which my own labors were to continue. Recalling my remarks about

problems of personal image that kept creeping into my design

considerations, it should not seem strange that from the start have

difficulties identifying and categorizing my own images of my

new neighbors. Often, I would have a certain picture in mind of

what someone was interested in and interested in doing. But, a

few minutes later, the picture would be disrupted by what that

person would actually do or say.

For instance, it was my great expectation that everyone in

the countryside would be immensely interested in the subject of the

area's bountiful natural attributes and their conservation. With

the Green Mountains reigning serenely in the backround of everyone's

daily routine, it was difficult for me to accept that, almost to a

man, the native Vermonter really doesn't give a damn. At least, not

on the surface. What takes his interest first - understandably,

I supnose - are issues like jobs, financial aggrandisement in general,

new cars and appliances when it is possible to buy them, and trouble-

free plumbing. Who got the best deal for what and where is a very

prevalent topic of conversation. Meanwhile, here I was, a native city

dweller willing to spartanly adapt himself to the rigors of the country-

side. At that time, I was eagerly looking forward to the challenge of

total non-electric living. To be sure, Bennington Battle Day (a state

holiday commemorating the ex'loits of Ethan Allen, his brother, Ira,

along with the rest of the Green Mountain Boys) was replete with

political speeches full of reference to "our God-given heritage of

green woods and fresh lakes". These types of phrases seemed to flow

as easily as the barbecue sauce, the remains of both sailing off into

2$6

the green woods along with the paper plates.

The world of construction methods and materials also underwent

serious misalignment in my eyes between its image and the revealed

reality. Real log cabins, for instance, were to be found few and

far between in the verdant Vermont hills. Like anywhere else, the

lumberyards stocked quarter-inch thin, imitation walnut-grained vinyl

paneling. There were warped and knot-ridden two-by-fours of question-

able dimension. And there was pastel-shaded aluminum siding to tack

up on the outside of your home and there were linoleum bricks to

paste to your kitchen subfloor. This state of affairs is even more

prevalent today than in 1968. To my mind, at least old crapped-up

sheetrock can have a funky charm given the right circumstances. Unhappily,

most of the remaining building wares exhibited in local showrooms

was, in my opinion, nothing more than unadulterated junk.

That these kinds of material were abundantly available should

have led me to question the kind of workmanship I would find practiced

in the vicinity. At this time, in 1968, I was little more than a

novice in relationship to hammer and nails, much less than to anything

as subtle as hanging a door or framing a window. In the beginning, I

was forced to rely upon the skills and thus the judgement of local

people. This was alright with me so long as they were willing to

live up to the image I had implanted in my mind: rouch-hewn timbers

being adzed by rouch-hewn carpenters. Solid craftsmanship combined

with unique form to make instant antiques. Yankee ingenuity teamed

with a strong Calvinistic work ethic. Perhaps these were all character-

istics which I needed to reinforce my own sense of myself trying to

take solid root in the mysterious and uncompromising woods surrounding

my new home.

As part of this syndrome, I experienced an enduring craving for

permanence and steadfastness. I fought against all sorts of suggestions,

among them one to remove some-dwarf-like truncated hemlocks Mr. Syzch

had planted around the base of the cabin to form a hedge. That I was

told the hemlocks were a marvelous breeding ground for mosquitoes

and worse cut no ice with me; hemlocks were green, hemlocks were a

part of Nature. However, one argument for their demise did eventually

impress me: they held dampness and mildew in around the base of the

walls. The sills and joists of the cabin were rotting out and several

of the pine logs driven into the earth for foundation posts were

shot already, leaving the whole cabin with a slight list. This was

not a condition to make for permanence, so, one Sunday, with no

one around to cry heresy or hypocrisy, the hemlock hedge disappeared

over a bank.

Originally, I had planned to do little remodeling work of any

kind. One thing was needed for sure, however, a new bridge of some

kind so that people could get to the cabin without first embarking

on an arduous portage. On my first day of ownership, I tried to make

my way across the remains of a wooden bridge which had been severely

damaged by the freshets of the previous spring. While Mr. and Mrs.

Syzch were removing their last few possessions from the cabin and

their children were happily absorbed scupting little dams and canals

in what was left of the path, I gingerly picked my way across the

pieces of splintered wood. My mind was pre-occupied with wonderingwhether Mr. and Mrs. Syzch thought it shameful that such a young

person seemed to have so much money to waste. A few coagulated tuftsof grass and mud looked to me like a solid bearing, and my foot and

leg went right through to the cold running stream beneath. At thisinstant, I took little comfort contemplating that this little un-

named brook was scurrying into the somnolent Williams River, which,in turn, swept majestically, side-by-side with the Connecticut, into

the Sea, etc. No. The children broke into peals of shrieking laughter.When they subsided, their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Syzch, gracefully

expressed their sincere hope that I would have as wonderful a time

as they had had during their ten-year sojourn in Vermont. With that,the whole family, showing surprising nimbleness, skipped across the

jagged wooden shards and pulled away in their sagging station wagon.

I was left there to ponder, and to dry off. For sure, I needed

to do something about that bridge. And, later tip-toeing up a shaky

makeshift stoop, I also determined that the six foot,.zero, door

would have to go as well.

Let us now enter this home, just now forsaken by its inhabitantsof ten years duration. For the most part, this family made the housewhat it was this day; they have just disappeared from the face of theearth, and the new owner steps across the threshold. Picture the mo-ment. There are no sounds but that of the forest. No one is there butyourself. You are walking into someone else's life - at least, intothat much of it which still breathes in the old iron bedstead on yourright, a tarnished yellow wood cooking stove across the room, a sheet-metal kitchen table with lopsided leaves sitting to your left. Plasticred-checked curtains stir idly by the small windows.

There is more here than just the unwanted, farmers-auction,furniture. It is a crabbed-up little network of walls and ceilingsand windows which have enveloped some strange times and events. Andpoor times, times of hardship, hunger, boredom, depression, and cold.Certainly cold. People of normal height have stood in this littlethirteen by sixteen space to the right of the miniscule entry vesti-bule formed between the end of the central partition and the door.The tops of their heads came within inches of the sheet-rocked ceiling.They surveyed the drab green of this ceiling oozing down to coverthe walls, and they surveyed each other.

It is early February. A southeastern morning light slants downthrough the three small windows which are oriented to receive it. Thewindows are two feet by three feet and mask the strong sunlight so thatonly enough comes through in a narrow swath to make one keenly awareof the shadow obscuring the rest of the room. On the other side ofthis interior wall are two other rooms, both soaking at this momentin chilly gloom. The one with the shaky kitchen table has a workcounter running along the north-facing exterior wall. The other room,which opens off the erstwhile kitchen, is a storeroom with no windows.The entrance to it is covered by a plastic shower curtain.

On this cold February morning, let us get up about eight o'clock.A bright shaft of sunlight has moved onto the quilt at the foot ofthe bed. A vague odor of incompletely consumed maple wood seems toemanate from the stove. The fire must be out. When we peek from be-neath the quilt, we can see the steam of our-breath dissolving inthe air. One of us quickly swings his feet from beneath the quilt andfeels for a pair of mocassins on the tattered rug. The leather isstiff from the cold but warms up quickly, initiating a clammy sensa-tion in the arch of the foot. He scurries over to the wood stove,making sure to keep as much as possible in one of the narrow shafts oflight. Leaning over the stove, he gingerly pries up a small blackiron plate. Is the fire completely out? Perhaps, but a thin wispof fine blue smoke curls into the sunlight. But it is either toodark in the shadow or not dark enough for him to spot any embersstill glowing in the charred pieces. It is difficult to determinehow much wood is even charred. He takes the poker leaning againstthe stove thrusts it into the black hole which is even darker thanthe cast iron stove top. Stirring the poker around, he tries to useit as a lever to turn up some of the wood down at the bottom. Tinderis going to be needed. A small cardboard box of it sits about tensteps away in the vestibule. He had left it there the afternoon be-

29

fore after slicing the pencil-thin fragments from a hunk of softmaplewood on the outside stoop. The sun was warm then, coming fromthe southwest as three in the afternoon. But the area is not warm now.The vestibule before the front door is dark, only illuminated fromthe outside glare coming through the windows. Little wisps of frigidair sift beneath the front door which has no weatherstripping. Whilehe is here, he might as well go a few steps further and get somematches from the kitchen. Turning the corner around the partition,he spots an instant coffee jar on the kitchen table. It reflects a*few arrows of light from the brightness outside. Otherwise, the smallroom is in deep gloom. And it is cold, cold, cold.

But, on June 1st, at one or two in the afternoon, the cabin isanything but cold. Shady inside, yes, slightly dank and foreboding inthe darker corners, but not unpleasantly so. The new owner looksaround a little bit, is bored by what he sees, and sits down on therickety bedstead to assess matters. As he sits, a small invisiblecloud of mustiness is rising around him. Having driven up from Bostonthat morning, I, as the new owner, had signed the deed at eleven,fell into my new stream at twelve, said goodbye to the former ownersa few minutes after that, and then stepped into the remains of whathad been their private world. All of a sudden, it had become my own,at least legally. However, although their belongings and their smellsand presumably their spirits were still in this place, another impor-tant factor was beginning to work on me. It was warm and humid out-side, cool and dark indoors. I decided to take a brief nap; myrenovation activities could wait until later in the day.

V

1 awoke anxious to get on with my list of priorities, the firstbeing to deal with the bridge. It was obvious I was going to needhelp here. To find it, I decided to explore the neighborhood. Down themuddy path I walked and slid and then negotiated my way across thebrook. This time I had more success. Turning the car around on theroad and heading back downhill, I recalled that I had seen some menworking with a backhoe near a small cluster of old houses about a mileaway. There were still there when I pulled up. As I watched for a fewseconds, the men put down the blocks of wood they had been luggingaround and turned to stare at the intruder. For a long moment nothinghappened, so I ordered myself not to be so shy and get a move on.Feeling a bit the effete city type, I slowly crossed the road andapproached a dusty young man astride an old backhoe. He seemed sus-picious of me in a wry way as T took a jaunty pose, one of my feetresting on some protruding part of his machine. I began to perspire,however, as I greeted him with a spineless, "hello, how do you do?"

30

He said nothing in reply, but motioned to an older man withshort, steely gray hair to come over. While this other man slowly appr-oached us, sweaty streaks apparent on his green work shirt, Ifinally noticed what kind of project they were engaged in: theywere moving a house. It was a small, simplified version of a plain,two-story farmhouse. At the moment sitting about thirty inches offthe ground, it had long day timbers poking out from beneath it.Supporting the timbers were squat criss-cross stacks of heavysquared-off logs. Apparently the boarded up structure had justbeen hauled from somewhere else and was about to be maneuveredonto a new cinder-block foundation.

The gray-haired man now stood before me. He wiped his foreheadfor a few seconds, and then asked slightly impatiently just what itwas that I wanted. I told him that I had j-ust bought this place upthe road "about a stone's throw away" which seemed to have a swampfor a driveway among other attributes. A brook there ran into theboggy mess just off the town road on one side and emerged twenty orthirty feet further downstream. Would he be interested in comingup and taking a look? Yes, he would, in an hour or so, when theirwork here was done. That was alright with me, and I returned to mycar, turned it around again, and headed back uphill. It seemed incredi-ble to me that I had not noticed that house sitting up off the groundwhen I had driven past that same spot earlier in the day. Perhapsit had just gotten there from some other direction. Coincidentally,just a few months later, the same men would have my own house up inthe air in exactly the same fashion.

About a quarter after four, a blue dump truck, much battered,screeched to a stop at my driveway. A billowing cloud of road dustinstantly caught up with it, presenting a sharp contrast with thecondition of my swampy driveway. Out of the truck climbed the manI had spoken with, followed by the boy who had been on the backhoe.The man introduced himself to me as Howard; the boy was his son, Don.We went down to the troublesome brook and surveyed the scene for afew minutes. All present agreed that something fairly drastic had tobe done. The choice, Howard suggested, was whether to merely put ina big corrugated steel culvert and pile lots of fill over it or goto the expense of building a real concrete bridge. Whatever, it wouldhave to provide a twelve-foot passage if I was ever expecting to drivea four-wheeled vehicle up to the cabin. Howard then suggested that Ihire him to put in the bridge. He had several reasons, one of whichwas that he knew a carpenter who would be interested in helping himbuild the formwork, Howard not being much of a carpenter. I said thatI would think about the whole thing and let him know down at the cornerwhat I had decided.

One day, when we were all working on the new bridge, Howard and

his carpenter friend, Barry, walked up the hill with me to take a look

at the inside of the cabin. For some reason, Barry had taken with him

3/

a long tool, perhaps it was an axe or a very large crowbar. By

this time in my thinking, I had determined that the partition wall

had to go as well as the low ceiling. For one thing, I could not

stand straight without my heading hitting against the pastel green

sheetrock of the ceiling. Barry asked me whether I was really sure

that I wanted the ceiling and interior partition to go. I replied

that I was sure. "Well, let's see what she'll look like!", he

shouted and flung the long steel tool through the ceiling. Several

clouds of dust floated down on us from the gaping hole above. Since

I had never really seen demolition take place from the inside, I

was taken aback - not to say horrified - by this behaviour. Maybe

it was the sight of a reasonably finished surface broken into so

wantonly, or perhaps it was seeing Barry doing it with such un-

concelaed glee. Whichever, I now felt as though the die had been

cast. A few days later, having moved outside as much of the old

furniture as I could, I tore down the rest of the ceiling material

and the entire inner partition. During that process, I was constantly

wary of running into a hidden hornet's nest or some other unknown,

but equally lethal, country insect. With the ceiling removed, the

ambient temperature of the cabin's interior climbed at least fifteen

degrees. Apparently the dead air space between the ceiling and the

roof peak had been a very efficient barrier against the heat of the

sun.

The interior of the cabin was now a large open area of almost

four hundred square feet. The tie rafters were soon moved upwards

another sixteen inches or so, providing a more comfortable head

clearance although a less strong roof. That condition would be dealt

with six months later when I saw what a five-foot accumulation of

sense snow on the roof would do to carefully hung doors and mitred

joints. Later that summer, however, the whole cabin was jacked up,

much like the house down at the corner had been, then moved over

twenty feet and turned about 45 degrees counter-clockwise. It was

then set upon a concrete foundation which had been newly poured to

receive it. I had gotten hold of an old redwood wine tank about ten

feet high and twelve feet in diameter. From this I had had milled.r. /V Cg//V

S57f+

almost 1200 board feet of kiln-dried, matched and grooved, redwood

boards. Much of this went onto the new ceiling formed by the relo-

cated ceiling-ties. This made the cabin seem a very dark place inside,

taking away any advantage gained by removingthe partition and raising

the ceiling height. However, concerns of time and money determined

that enough work had been done for this year. Barry had already re-

placed the short, six-foot door with one of normal height, in the

process building up a small dormer on the front of the house

peaking over the new door. From the outside, the cabin now looked

like a respectable, if minaturized, version of a little beach

bungalow of totally indeterminate style.

The following March - the year is now 1969 - I compromisedmy pioneering scruples to the extent of arranging for electricalservice to be run to the house. As there were no utility polesto be found on the town road passing my property, a number wouldhave to be raised and wires run back to the farmstead several thou-sand feet up the road. The decision to go electric had severalinteresting side effects. For one, I had to swear to the electriccompany that someday soon I would be a year-round resident and nota vacationer. I had to promise also that, when I got around to it,I would install electric heat, electric hot water , and an electricrange. It seemed that by thus indenturing myself to them for allthis future business, I could avoid paying a substantial servicecharge for the new poles and wire. Important consequences were toresult from these treaties. I was to find that heating a northcountry home and the price tag of that heat energy are two factorswhich strongly influence what the inside and the outside of thathome are going to look like.

Another interesting, if indirect effect of hooking up the juicewas to bring a certain orientation up the road in terms of getting toknow my neighbors up there rather than those below. It worked likethis. If one's home was not located on a dead-end road any new powerline would probably reach it from only one of two possible directions:from the right or from the left, that is, from up the road or fromdown. With the power line would eventually come the phone line whichwas usually strung along the same set of poles. Much signifiganceattaches to these seemingly trivial facts. First, in a rural area likemost of Vermont, where many small concentrations of population aresparsely spread around, there are likely to be many different powerand phone companies. My downhill neighbor, only about half a mileaway, has both a different phone company and a different electriccompany than I. Our rates for both services are different; so isthe equipment, installation procedures, etc. Until just last summer,it was a long distance charge for me to call this neighbor; yet therewas no charge to call ten miles away and two towns over in the oppo-

3,5

site direction.

Secondly, when a tree snaps, or some other calamity bringsthe lines down, it is your upstream neighbors who are probably inthe same predicament and with whom you might as well cooperate to

get the lights burning again. You go up to -their house and find out

whether they are stranded too or it is only yourself. If it is just

you, well, call the power company from their phone, and sit down with

a cup of strong black coffee while you wait. Hopefully, it is not

too long a wait, for when you have electric heat, and the power shuts

off, it can get chilly in a hurry. And, not meaning to mix metaphors,when you depend on an electric water pump for your water supply, onemight as well say that you are as good as sunk without the power to

run it. Then your neighbors are once again going to be important.

One other circumstance may be strongly affected by the direction

from which your wires come from: whom you are going to have live with

on the party line. And who is going to have to live with you.

So I made the fateful commitment and contracted for electricity.

This opened the way for all sorts of structural manipulations not very

practical without the aid of power tools. To deal with the problem

of roof support under heavy snow loading, Barry and I put in a post and

beam system running longitudinally through the center of the cabin.

Exploiting some ideas from a current design class at school, I was

much interested in playing with the concept of the superimposition

of a post-and-beam network within a stud-wall house frame. It seemed

a very efficient and direct way of dealing with sagging floors and

rooflnes. In our system, the posts and beams were able to interlock

with each other, both being built up of laminations of two-by-six

hemlock lumber. The surface continuity of the stud framed wall was

also something I felt I had to get away from in order to open up the

cabin's interior. Thus I could alleviate the feeling of dark closeness

left by the small windows and dark redwood ceiling.

Removing the section of floor which had previously underlain

most of the old bedroom area abruptly demarcated for me the "wall-

zone" by leaving it a sharp edge overlooking the basement floor

eight and a half feet below. Between a center column located on this

edge and the long rear wall, I framed in at table height a large

sheet of plywood. This would serve as a work surface or emergency

sleeping place. The center column to which the plywood was connected

became trellised with a set of intricately framed shelving. It was

true that objects could role under the work surface right into the

basement, and often did, but at least half the precipice formed

by removing the floor was closed in by this construction.

I had some unusual plans for dealing with the rest of that

precipice and its relationship with the basement level. A fairly

wide set of stairs would come down along the front concrete founda-

tion wall and complete its way to the basement floor. For reasons

now hard to recall, I wanted the basement area which opened almost

sixteen feet to the redwood ceiling above to serve as an arena for

experiments in psychodrama. Audience or participants could seat them-

selves on the overhanging edge of the first floor, on the stairs

down to the landing, on the landing itself, or on the final half-

flight down to the floor. Meanwhile, the actors or whoever would use

the basement floor for their stage. Alternatively, the stage could

be the landing, and people would be able to view the proceedings from

above or below it. With this idea still in mind, Barry and I built

a concrete block room in the part of the basement beneath the remain-

ing section of the first floor. One of the walls of this room made

several odd turns in a hypothetical response to the proposed stair-

way and landing. Four years later, the room was furnished as a dark-

room. Although this use did not really require block construction, it

was built this way so that the oddly turning wall segment could also

act as a structural butress. A length of the un-reinforced concrete

foundation wall seemed capable of developing cracks under the pressure of

clay hillside force on its outside face. The plans for a minature

theater of psychodrama never really worked out, at least partially

because I had no true sense of the dimensions involved. The idea of

people sitting on stairs and watching others who were perhaps watch-

ing them, however, was not forgotten. It came out again, several

years later, while building the major addition. That will be discussed

later.

A7seZ~ WORK-

Cutting away the first floor like this left a very small area 7

for a main floor, about two hundred square feet. There was little

space to sleep, let alone store or cook anything. As far as some of

the other body functions were concerned, a service-station two and

half miles away received a daily visit during the cooler months.

The situation could not remain that way for long. There was no place

to work, and all my personal belongings quickly became covered with

sawdust. It was several months after cutting out the floor that the

concrete piers described several charters ago were built. They soon re-

ceived two built-up columns and corresponding beams. Eventually

a deck of matched three-by's sprang out along the beams. The deck

was at an eight foot level relative to the level of the remaining

section of the main floor. The slope of the old roof was extended

up and over this deck to provide cover for it. Windows and walls were #Y07,/77 4 B A 4'V7 /44Nfilled in, and thus a new sleeping loft was added to the usable

area of the cabin.The windows consisted of two four-foot by seven-

foot sandwiches of hermitically sealed insulating plate glass. They

were bought in Keene, New Hampshire, from a dealer who had a stock

of sixty-six such windows. Each one had been cut a few inches too

long or too short for some particular job which was already complete

except for the glazing, which had been wrongly dimensioned the first

time around. The windows sold for about thirty dollars apiece. When

I haC heard someone discussing this incredible bargain at a.restaurant

in Putney, Vermont, I immediately drove down to Keene to investigate.

I mention this because chronologically the loft addition was

actually designed around the availability of these windows, not the

other way around.

It was now possible to stand on the basement floor, look up

through the shelves or beneath the worktable, through the posts and

past the new butcher-block kitchen counter, and out through the

large windows of the loft into the sky beyond. That upward progression

of levels and spaces paralleled in some ways the natural uphill

climb of the wooded slopes outside. Further, the eyes' journey began

from a vantage point beneath the surface of the ground, traveled /770onto the first floor level equivalent to the surface, and then took

off into the spaces beyond, puncuated only by the simple redwood

casing around the loft windows. All in all, the feelings engendered

in me, at least, were at this point satisfying, even if some visi-

tors thought the experiment charming but eccentric.

The post and beam system, worktable, and shelves, and theloft addition constituted the major construction effort for thatyear. By this time, there was also running water entering thebasement through a plastic hose. The water originated about fivehundred feet up in the woods from a kind of makeshift springbox.From there, the water line came down a few hundred feet, gatheredunderground in a concrete tile, and then flowed through one-inchplastic pipe into the basement. It was a good gravity-fed watersupply, developing about twenty pounds per square inch pressureat its downhill terminus. Everyone considered the system a greatsuccess when it was demonstrated to be able to shoot a stream ofwater clear over the ridge peak of the house. Unhappily, it wasnot to last. More on this later.

The spring of the following year, some local plumbers installeda bathroom, at least the fixture part of it. For the walls and floor,I decided to experiment with a total wood interior coated with anumber of layers of waterproof varnish. This made for a nice colorcontrast with the avocado green of the new bathroom fixtures. Onemay be tempted to remark that the cabin in the woods was becomingever so slightly suburban.

A kitchen counter was fashioned from a twelve-foot length ofused bowling alley flooring. It was installed on the interiorpartition wall of the bathroom so that the kitchen sink couldbe plumbed along with the bathroom lines. The counter stretchedalong this wall from one of the last year's built-up posts up tothe end wall. There it embedded itself in a complicated latticeworkof structural shelving which one climbed to get into the sleepingloft. This assemblage stands to this day, although much else haschanged.

This brings us into the summer of 1970. I had moved to myVermont house after school had ended, setting up a temporary dark-room in the new kitchen: an enjoyable situation for an amateur photo-grapher, one experienced in an idyllic setting. But I was bored.One morning during the first week of August, I was developing somefilm in a small, light-proof tank in the kitchen. Through the AMradio, which was just making out a station in Keene, Arthur Godfreyaquainted me with the details of his latest visit to Banff NationalPark in Canada. He was saying that the air was pure there and thatthe only long-haired critter he spotted, fortunately, was a mountaingoat. Or something like that. Curiously, his monologue left me with.a cutting sensation of restless wanderlust.

I'

S7

My affairs were put quickly put in order. The next morningsaw me heading west with a good buddy toward the California coast.Enough of the Vermont woods for the time being. A matress had beenthrown into the open pickup body, sleeping bags and pieces ofclothing stuffed between it and the back of the cab. Let the rainbe damned. In the interest of speed one person would drive, whilethe other could contemplate the great sky above while flat on hisback on the elegant mattress in the rear. Twenty-five days andten thousand miles later, our time-saving system of driving onlyhaving barely worked, we wearily straggled back over the Vermontborder, slowly negotiated the dips and curves of route 9, andfinally arrived home to Windham County. As the days became shorter,I realized it would soon be time to return to MIT. But I would notbe leaving my home unoccupied. My friend of the great western tourhad asked me if he could rent it during the intervening nine monthsuntil next summer.

VI

A new slant on things came with renting out the house. Itbecame a sort of bitter-sweet experience for me even to be there.Although the rent was low, I suffered a passion that the house mustperform perfectly any function that my friend - now, tenant -should require of it. His suggestions for minor, and not so minor,changes or additions were carried out all throughout the fall duringweekend visits. I was perhaps experiencing a parental type of over-protectiveness, reasoning that if I remedied any conceivable imper-fections in design or construction, my rentor would feel extremelyhesitant about undertaking any such renovations himself. If it wasmade strongly apparent to him that I took such fussy care of theplace, he, himself, might be less inclined to be anything less thancareful.

As one may imagine, so long as I was struggling under thisheavy load of worry, it was difficult for us to even remain friendly.Consequently, the problem of trust between us became at timeseven more acute. I had heard that the Vermont winter could come toseem cruel and endless to some people, leading them to intensefeelings of depression and frustration, not to say despair. Conceivably,just such a bout could result in some tantrum-like rage which, inits course, would inflict some unimaginable damage on the defenselesshouse. Just a fantasy, of course. I really had little reason tosuspect that my friend, or anyone I knew, for that matter, would endup doing such a thing. But this was the tenor of some of my thoughts.

Fortunately, after the rental period was over, and he and his girl-friend helped me on a project and I helped them on another, ourfriendship seemed to revive.

As I said, though, when he first moved in, I interpreted his

every wish to be my command. He said he needed more space than just

the 200 square feet divided between the bathroom and the kitchen

a,d the extra 90 square feet of the sleeping loft. This became even

more true after his girlfriend moved in with him. In response, I

abandoned my dissipating dreams for the psychodrama theater. Working

swiftly one Saturday, Barry and I rapidly framed in a new floor

to replace the one we had ripped out the year before. There were

differences between the two, however. Most important was that the

new floor level was set sixteen inches below the old. Also, though

this aspect was hidden from any but a basement view, the new floor

joists ran in a direction perpendicular to that of the old ones.

We had attached a new beam to last year's post and beam system. This

allowed the new joists to run into it, thus paralleling the long

dimension of the house. Now we were able to frame in a long hatch-like

opening along the rear wall. This opening would one day take a flight

of stairs going down to the basement. Although this opening would

noticeably cut down the small ten by sixteen foot dimension of the

new sunken area, it was the sixteen foot dimension which would be

diminished, not the already short ten foot one.

Another interest my new tenant expressed was to beef up theheating system. At that time, it consisted merely of two eight-footelectric baseboard heaters. For really cold days or just quick warm-ups, there was also on hand a 220-volt, 4000 watt portable unitheater. But this device was a nuisance to hook up, and had a tendencyto eat electricity like a Cadillac eats gasoline. For more than ayear I had been negotiating with a sportsman's club about fifteenmiles away in Perkinsville to purchase their antique soapstone wood-stove.

Soapstone stoves are heavy, whitish stone boxes usually furnishedwith matching stone lids. These lids are capable of being pried upto load the stove only because they are usually counterweighted withiron cannonballs welded to overhanging steel brackets. Many yearsago, these cute quarter-ton items were produced from the soft milk-white soapstone auarried at a number of locations through New Englandand Appalachia. Now they were made (when they were made) only in asmall shop in the one-street village of Perkinsville. The specimen Iwas dickering for was about eighty years old, and had resided for the

OF; M'-

37

last several years on the front porch of the secretary and treasurerof the rod-and-gun club. He told me that the club had either movedto new quarters or had switched to oil heat, I for get which. Soonafterward, they had sold one of their two stoves.

That left one other stove, which was in relatively good shape,and I had offered the man $200 for it when I had accidentallyspotted it during the previous summer of 1969. A new version of asimilar stove would have cost more than $550, assuming that thepart-time stone mason could find time to make one. And it would nothave had the cannonballs. The secretary-treasurer had wanted $300for the stove when I first spoke with him, so the matter was left tostand for a time. For better than a year, as it turned out. When mytenant suggested that I get an iron or steel stove and put it in thenew sunken living room, I decided to go back to the man in Perkinsvilleand offer him $250. The stove would do away with a lot of scrap lum-ber sitting around and would soon pay for itself through savingson the electric bill, I reasoned to myself before making the offer.$250 seemed fair to both parties and a deal was struck.

Several days later, four ambitious young men, including myself,backed the tailgate of the pickup to the ornate railing of the oldfront porch. Deploying an intricate combination of ropes and pulleys,we managed to heft the almost five-hundred pound hulk into the truck.The vehicle, even though rated a three-quarter ton pickup, saggedabout four inches under the concentrated load.

As I bid adieu to the secretary-treasurer of the sportsman'sclub, he mentioned to me that he was by vocation a jeweler in Spring-field. If I or my friends ever needed a fine wristwatch, we shouldstop by to see him. Assuring him that I would keep his offer inmind, we maneuvered the gently listing truck out of his graveleddrive-,ay and gingerly turned homeward with our ponderous load.

The "wall zone" now had a diverse physical form and combination

of functions. Remember that half its length was consumed by the

work table/sleeping place. This assembly included the center column

with its plumage of shelving. The other half, towards the front side

of the house with its dormer-covered door, became a large, two-

seated, bench-like staircase. One descended the short flight of two

steps down from the kitchen and bathroom area into the living room.

Since the much used wood stove was located in this lower area, the

steps were much traveled and easily became littered with sawdust,

wood shavings, and pieces of detached bark. Not an ideal living room

sofa from the point of view of tidiness. But the sixteen-inch height

of the staircase considered along with the short eight or nine foot

width remaining to this room, the steps were not a bad place to

sit oneself to warm up before the hissing and crackling woodstove.

An attempt to describe the general plan of circulation through

the house at this time might involve using the concept of a spiral

or corkscrew type of path. One entered at the mid-section of the

twist, something like walking into the Boston Sea-aquarium of New

York's Guggenheim on the second or third floor. The path turns

around counter-clockwise and winds down the two wide steps, across

the sunken living room and down a ladder into the basement. Going

clockwise, one travels through the kitchen area and up a shelf/

ladder into the loft bedroom. It is self-educating to observe that

a couple of year's later, in the new, much larger addition, the

motif is unwittingly repeated, albeit reversed. Enter here at mid-

level and one goes up by moving in an abstract counter-clockwise

manner. The'genetic molecule' motif has thus reolicated itself with

a mirror twist.

My tenant now seemed happy with the new added floor area, thewoodstove, and a brick chiminey built to vent the stove. I forcedmyself to retreat to Cambridge for a few weeks in an effort toencourage everyone to get on with their own lives for the time being.But a *ew days after the start of this proposed hiatus, a phone callcame to lamentingly inform me that my wonderful, perpetual, gravity-feed water system had seemed to squirt its last. Obviously not beinga landlord disposed to leaving his tenants high and dry, I immediatelydrove up to the house to assess the scene. And the scene was dry. Noteven a rainfall of several days duration seemed likely to boost thedepleted surface and ground water supply enough to replenish the spring-box.

I decided to go around to my neighbors in the valley to seewhether they had similar problems and how they were coping with them.It turned out that whether they relied on a shallow springbox forsub-surface collection or a drilled artesian well to tap deeper sources,everyone was experiencing a greatly diminished supply. For me to hirea well-driller, myself, seemed the more certain and permanent step totake next. But the expense involved was likely to considerable, poss-ibly catastrophic, by the time I was finished. For one paid by the footfor every foot the twirling drill forced its way down through themuck and rock. And this was the case whether or not any water wasever found in the hole.

Redigging the springbox up on the hill was an alternative, but

/010.,qO,01 71401V

possibly a futile one. However, as long as the backhoe was pawing aroundin the woods, other sites for new boxes could be investigated. If needbe, they could all be linked together, combining their individuallymodest collections as a tree's tiny roothairs acting together bringinto the trunk a surprisingly substantial flow of water. (Did youknow, for instance, that a fully mature broad-leaf tree can castinto the air upwards of 4000 gallons of water during one hotsummer's day?)

But when I went for an exploratory walk through the woods lookingfor likely spots to dig, I found the fallen leaves and needles exceed-ingly dry to the touch. The earth, when uncovered, exhibited a uniformtawny brown indicating a high clay content only minimally moist. Itwas very questionable whether I would be able to locate sufficientpatches of darker, humid soil which, when excavated, would liberatea hidden flow. But, in the short run, it seemed a cheaper expedientto pay the $12 an hour for a backhoe rather than contract for the serv-ices of a twenty-ton drilling rig. An absolute minimum price for aworking artesian well of reasonable output had to be 500 or a thousanddollars. And that would be getting away easily.

Deciding to gambel on the springbox, I found that my neighborup the road had had good luck when he dug out a bountiful springboxduring a dry season a few years before. Like many gamblers of exper-ience, he attempted to hedge his bet or at least help the odds alonga bit. His wife's brother-in-law's cousin, or similar relation, claimedto be a diviner of the unseen paths of underground spring waters. Inshort, he was a water douser. My good neighbor informed me that thisman had, indeed, a copious talent in this field and had located myneighbor's large spring quickly and surely. Perhaps he might do thesame ior me. I replied that, although I had never seen a douseroperate, I was willing and interested in giving him a chance. Myneighbor rang up his distant relation and then told me that he wouldshow up the following noon. For remuneration, the douser would acceptonly the cost of his gasoline in driving to my house.

A few minutes after twelve the next day, a fairly new, light pastelDodge hardtop unceremoniously eased over my small concrete bridgeand pulled up the now dusty driveway. From the driver's side emergeda tall, lean man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. My neighbor, who wasshorty, more portly, his face slightly florid in the heat, got outfrom the other side. We all greeted each other in the brief custom ofthe region: with a nod. Then we went on to comment on the dryness ofthe weather.

The douser then slowly walked to the rear of his car and beganto search through the multitude of keys on his keyring. In the trunkwas where he apparently kept the fabled instrument, his dousing rod.He soon found the correct key and inserted it in the small slot abovethe rear license plate. Above the slot, slightly rusted chromium lettersspelled the word, DODGE, for the benefit of tailgaters, of whom quitea few probably found themselves behind this elderly gentleman'svehicle. The cover of the trunk then yawned open as though the magic

instrument inside was bored and pushing its way to get out. Openingfull, the cover shuddered slightly as it came to a full stop. Somewhatanxiously, I approached the trunk and peered inside.

At first, I thought there was nothing there. There was no sparetire, no bumper jack, tire irons, or even old greasy tennis balls, notthat I expected them. The only thing immediately apparent to my eyeswas the mottled gray sheen of the vinyl covering material. Then Isaw the "rod". It had been hidden in the shadow of the trunk cover.It sat there like a priceless fossilized bone in the midst of a largeexpanse of otherwise empty exhibition case. The "rod" was, in fact,nothing more than an old stick, a mere twig, denuded of bark andlooking very ancient and dry. It was 'Y' shaped, not unlike a turkey'swishbone.

The diviner picked it up reverently, grasping the short, upperarms of the one-legged 'Y'. His hands took a peculiar position, thethumbs bent over backwards and apparently under great strain. I wasreminded of being shown by a young friend many years ago a series offinger and wrist contortions which he claimed were powers grantedhim by a rare combination of genetic mutations. The grip of the divinerseemed so painful to me that I hesitated to test my own talents withthe stick when he offered it to me. I tried to imitate the exact wayhe placed his fingers and thumbs, but it was too difficult. Thestick in response to my efforts made no indication that a Great Lakewas to be found beneath our feet if we cared to look and dig a little.The douser briefly commented that it appeared that there was eitherno water immediately about or that I couldn't find it. I imagine itwas the latter.

Whichever, he took the stick back from my tense, cramped fingersand regripped it in his peculiar manner. Slowly he paced around tothe rear of the house, my neighbor and I following him closely. Herewas a shock. The douser had stopped and was peering down, whetherstudying the rod or watching his step I was not sure. Suddenly, thefront unheld leg of the 'Y' dived downwards.

"Dive", is the only word I can think of to describe the strong,directed action the stick seemed to take of its own accord. I sawthe sinews and veins in the douser's wrists stiffen and bulge witheffort to restrain it. There was an intense battle of wills takingplace. The once lifeless-looking stick wanted to shoot straightdown into the earth; the diviner wanted to keep it up, qliding andtracking a path.

It was incredible. I could see no way, given the weird gripwith the thumbs pulled down and back, that the douser, himself,could have snapped the stick downwards in such an acute, jerkingmotion. When I said as much to the others, my neighbor's perspiringface took on a very self-satisfied look. His relative, the douser,informed me that some water-diviners of his acquaintance did not usesticks of wood at all, merely bent coat hangers. Meanwhile, I saw

that, following the terrier-like stick, the man had managed to tracethe exact path of the underground pipeline put in two years before.By this time, the ground had been raked smooth and planted with grass.Seasons had turned and leaves had dropped, all in all leaving no traceof the buried plastic pipe. Since neither of these two men had everin my knowledge been on this property before, there seemed to be noway they could have known beforehand the precise path of the under-ground line. There was at least sixty feet of this pipeline making awide arc from the edge of the forest around and into one corner ofthe basement. I was left with little to say as we trekked further intothe woods.

Some months later, I had occassion to pass on my experiences withthe water diviner to the county forester. He was a government manand said that if asked his official opinion on water-divining he wouldhave to respond with a neutral, 'maybe'. But, off the record, what hehad seen during his years of ministering to farmers and other land-owners had convinced him that a good douser was at least the equalof geological surveys, rock soundings, and aerial photographs all puttogether. That is, if you wanted to find water, and not just spendsome of the taxpayer's money.

As we went deeper into the woods, the diviner's talents wereexhibited again and again. Strangely, I soon lost much of my originalamazement at his powers. My thoughts were becoming preoccupied withcontemplating the possible costs of the coming digging operations.

For there seemed to be springs all over the place, many of themjust off the original pipeline. Each would have to be explored, andthe plastic pipeline broken.wherever one showed promise of deliveringa reasonable flow.- Everytime the douser found a new spring, I snappedoff a dead branch and hammered it into the spot with a rock. An hourlater, we left the woods near where we had entered. As a last favor,I asked the douser to find a likely spot in the front of the houseto drill an artesian well if, for some reason, that ever becamenecessary. He did find such a place, though remarking that the vibra-tions from below were not felt so strongly by his stick when they camefrom so far beneath the surface. This was especially true, he added,when the detected water was flowing beneath many feet and thousandsof pounds of dense bedrock.

When he, or his stick, finally narrowed it down to a precisepoint on the earth, I pounded in a large stake and asked him what Iowed. "About two dollars", he answered. I handed him a five, thankingboth him and my neighbor profusely. They said that they hoped theyhad been of service. Before they got into the car, the diviner rever-ently returned his instrument to its resting place in the trunk andclosed the cover over it. Then the two gentlemen got into the car andslowly drove down the driveway, throwing large clouds of dry dustinto the air behind them.

I duly investigated some of the springs the diviner had indicatedwith his bobbing wooden stick. Each one was marked with a twig nearthe point where it might be spliced into the existing line. A back-hoe had come up into the woods and proceeded to excavate deep grave-like holes in the soft earth. As the hoe's narrow bucket scrapedup a mouthful, the exposed layers of blue and gray clay would spalloff a small section which would fall back into the deepening pit.Sometimes, a tear-like trickle of cloudy fluid might then ooze out as

though a small wound had been opened. How much all these dribs anddrabs would amount to together would determine whether the output of

a given hole was sufficient to tie it in to the rest of the system.After three or four such craters were gouged from the floor of theforest, we stopped work to see whether any were filling with water.All were, but at a rate frustratingly slow. I called off the backhoefor that day and myself retreated for twenty-four hours before re-examining the holes. When I did so, I was disappointed to find onlyhalf a dozen inches in the best of them. So much for the springs.

I now got in touch with a locally known well driller who, severaldays later, backed in over the little bridge with his specializedrig: a long flat truck with an immense trussed boom atop. The re-sembled a massive rolling military weapon. Wide heavy steel tubesand ten-foot, solid shafted drill stems were draped on both sidesof the boom. I pointed out to the drillers the stake I had drivenat the divining rod's final noddinq suggestion and left the men toset themselves up while I went away to pick up some supplies for anotherproject.

When I returned little more than an hour later, the whole greatmechanism was erect and clanking, the boom standing high, swaying withan easy rolling rthym. From the surprisingly small puncture in theground at which all the effort was directed, tiny brown and graymudballs arched into the air a few feet, then splattered onto theadjacent soil. A small crater-like rim was forming from the accumulationof this wet debris. It was as though a large but slender subterran-ean animal were burrowing through the ground beneath us ejecting itsrefuse out behind it.

Of the two men involved with the rig, only one seemed to be payingany attention to it. His hand rested rested on a long lever, and hisleg was propped up on a small steel staging projecting from the rearbumper. He seemed to be lost in thought, isolated from the surroundingworld by the steady beat-beat of the diesel engine and the monotonousdin of the shaft revolving in the ground. The other man sat calmlysmoking a cigarette on a five gallon fuel can about twenty feet fromthe drilling apparatus.

Apparently interested in talking, the man on the gas can pointedout to me the large circular gage located by the collar throughwhich the drill shaft was slowly descending. That gage, he informedme, showed what percentage of the weight of the rear half of therig was bearing down on the drill head at any given instant. Thesofter the layer of material the bit was presently engaged in, theless downward pressure, along with turning and chewing, was neededto penetrate the layer. The needle of the gage was at that momenthovering between ten and fifteen on the percentage scale. Given thatit was a twenty ton rig, with more or less half its weight alreadyresting on the front tires, then about two or three thousand poundsof pressure were pushing down on the bit.

But, he resumed, that would change when we got through all theclay and muck and shale. Then the "fun" would begin. With upwards ofof fifty per cent pressure, about five tons, the larger nine-inchcarbide bit now biting and chewing would be exchanged for a six-inchdiamond studded bit. The heavy steel casing tubes, looking now somuch like the ominous muzzles of heavy field artillery, would behammer driven through the already drilled soft layers. This actionwould prevent those layers from collapsing in on the newly carvedcylindrical channel. The new bit would undertake its grinding,augering task continually bathed and cooled by a stream of freshwater pumped down and then back up. The water would bring with itto the surface finely ground and powdered rock, forming a pastymass as it sloughed onto the surrounding ground.

The talkative workman told me that most people entertainedan interesting myth about the nature of artesian wells. They thoughtthat when an underground vein or pocket or hopefully a small lakewas finally struck by the relentless drill, a great geyser of waterwould foam up the tubular excavation. It would burst from the holeand drench men and machines before it could be capped. Actually, hesaid, very seldom did water in the shaft even come near approachingthe surface. The only way one would know when water had been struckwas to watch closely the pumped water already being disgorged fromthe hole in the ground and choked with rock dust. If there was asudden, appreciable increase in this amount, it would indicate newunderground sources augmenting the flow. And this is what the otherman who was running the drilling rig was intently watching for.

As far as my own well was progressing, the shift in the operationfrom the larger bit to the smaller, diamond one took place when adepth of sixty-five feet had been reached. This was the point at whichthe clay, shale, and compressed mud gave way to dense, homogeneousbedrock. The first day of work also ended here. As I drove down toBellows Falls early that evening, I closely scrutinized the deepgashes made by the approach roads to the Interstate highway cuttingthrough the nearby topography. The multi-hued, striated masses thusexposed were representative, I gathered, of the bedrock the drillersback at the house had just penetrated. Here and there on the surfaceof this denuded rock set sparkling by the rays of the descending sun,

44J__*

were sheens and glistens of steadily dripping water. I hoped it wouldnot be too much longer before similar, yet perhaps more copious,sources found their way into the deepening shaft. It was sevendollars a foot going down, whether what was found was water or morepasty rock dust.

Work resumed early the next morning, the drill head advancinganother ten or fifteen feet before anyone felt the urge to speak. Thenmy informant of the day before yielded up a few more details he hadlearned and experiences he had had during his days as a well-driller.For one thing, the highway department of the state of Vermont hadhired some time ago a water diviner for its engineering staff. Forwhenever the state disrupted someone's water supply by its road-build-ing activities, it was the state's legal obligation to renew thatsupply. They usually chose to do this by drilling new wells. And, topick the sites of these new wells, they used their salaried diviner.

The man worked in the usual way, the story had it, with a rodfashioned from a bent fruitwood branch as his instrument. But thisparticular diviner, someday to be pensioned by the state highwaydepartment, was apparently a superman among diviners. For wheneverhis knarled wooden stick honed in on a really large aqueous depositdeep beneath the earth, the lifeless tool would shake and rear upand down in the diviner's hands. And then it would burst into flames!

This I was told by the well driller sitting on the gasolinecan. I would have thought that the last thing a dry wooden stick woulddo on contact, spiritual or otherwise, with water, would be to catchon fire. If ethereal matters in any way corresponded with corporealones, water would quench the fire, not ignite it. But perhaps thecorrespondence between the two worlds in this instance worked insuch a way that opposites attracted or at least initiated each other.Furthermore, there was no use in doubting the truth of the story, Iwas told. The public service diviner had polaroid photos to provehis claim.

Another tall tale I heard that morning concerned a school teacherwho had built a house for himself and his family in the next town tothe south of us. He had recently arrived in the county when he builtthe brand new structure, and he had waited until it was finishedbefore trying to locate the water that would service it. That turnedout to be a mistake.

The teacher hired just these drillers to set up their quiveringrig and search for the precious stuff. Search they did. Five hundredand fifty feet down and almost four thousand dollars later, they hadnot found a single drop. Quite distraught, to say the least, thenew homeowner halted the operation and begged them to try anotherspot. The drillers courteously obliged him, but another four thousanddollars further, the teacher was now absolutely besides himself.

Consider: already a new home to pay off, a young growing familyin the roost, a new job which was not one of the highest paying. Withgreat but wavering fortitude, he determined to give it one more try.

24%

17

The teacher asked the drillers to try one more place. Under nocircumstances was it to be near one of the old ones. Accordingly,the drillers lowered their rig, and reset and raised it at thenew designated position. (The landowner always picks the site.) Theyput their pulleys and shafts into motion.

Twenty feet was all they went down. They had seen no signs ofwater thus far and neither had they any expectation of it at soshallow a depth. But the pacing young teacher had seen no water either.He stopped the drillers at twenty feet and walked off the site. Eventhis minute dry scratch in the surface had been too much for him.His nerve was shattered, and he could not bear to go on. Shortlyafterward, he left town with his family and was never seen again. Itwas said that some arrangement had been made to deed his now almost . 00worthless dwelling to the drilling company owner in lieu of paymentfor the barren holes in the ground. *

Needless to say, by now I, myself, was sweating bullets.The

grating mechanical monster was yet spinning at full blast. I remem- OF pbered that a neighbor two or three miles up the road, the personnearest to me with a drilled well, had gone down about five hundredtwenty feet, finally forced to settle for a total flow of two quartsa minute. And, at that, it was two quarts of very hard, mineral-ladenwater. I hoped that I would not end up paying some $3600 for that kindof result. My worries were beginning to get the better of me, so Idecided to leave the drillers to their clanking dreadnaught for atime. I drove into the Falls for a prolonged lunch helped down withmore than one cold brew.

Later that afternoon, I returned to the scene of action. As hotand dry as the weather was, my mouth was still dryer, the cold beersnotwithstanding. As I parked the car and began to trudge up the drive-way, I quickly saw that the whole drilling rig had disappeared. Andso had the drillers. Maybe they thought that I, like the calamity-struck schoolteacher, had simply abandoned the site, not having thestomach or the wallet to suffer the consequences of a prolonged drillingoperation.

Covering the the section of steel casing protruding from thewellhead was a large, upside-down plastic flower pot. This I removedto peer down into the humid depths of the hole. I coild detect nothingbut blackness. I threw a little pebble down the shaft and quickly putmy ear to the opening. Nothing. Perhaps the pebble had been too small.I would not let myself face the possibility that the shaft had been toodeep to hear the hit bottom. I poked around on the ground for anotherstone, perhaps the size of a marble. When I found one, I gingerlydropped it into the casing.

Seconds of silence. Plunk.

Now that I had done this and had counted the seconds of the fall,I could not for the life of me remember the simple highschool formulato figure out how far in feet the fall had been. Not only could I not

guess the distance down the water was, but I had no idea how muchof it there was, or how deep the well went beneath the surfaceof the water level making the 'plunk'. Perhaps what was plunkingdown there was just a puddle remaining from their pumped coolingsupply. But the drillers would return, for I saw scattered aroundthe site some wrenches and other paraphenalia which belonged to them.

I was right. Fifteen minutes later, I spied a cloud of dustrapidly boiling up the town road. Then an old blue pickup swept acrossthe bridge and over the driveway. My heart was in my mouth as themen stopped their truck with a skid just in front of me. Theyjumped out and immediately set about retrieving their equipment

"What's the story?", I asked hesitantly of my confidant ofthe past two seat-filled days.

"You were lucky", he replied, not even looking at me as he busilypacked away the tools. "Yep, ten gallons a minute at a hundred andthirty feet. Yep, you were lucky."

With that, he popped into the truck where his silent partner wassilently waiting. The two quickly spun their truck around and wheeleddown the driveway and out onto the road. The ubiquitous dust cloudfollowed them out of view. Presumably they were in a hurry to get totheir next job. As far as I was concerned, however, I had had enoughexperience with that particular line of work. At least the bankwould be more than willing to lend good money for a good well. Therewere few better investments in the State of Vermont than a strong,certain flow of water. At least, not that year.

Meanwhile, I sense that I had better get back to my own business,that is, the business of this thesis.

VIII

I left my tenants alone in their well-supplied little home

for a number of months. Not returning until April of 1971, I was

in Cambridge building minute model buildings to be tested in a windtunnel. A research company was interested in testing the aerodynamic

effects winds circumventing the full-scale originals of these build-

ings would have on innocent pedestrians passing by. Following thislucrative job undertaken in a small business building in CentralSquare, I returned to a design class at MIT. The job had left me some

funds with which to think about doing some more building in Vermont.

Thus, as I sat drawing up a remodeled Southend tenement, I saw

visions of a new massive structure of concrete to be situated this

time in front of the house. It would be tied into the rest somehow

through a connection with the front door to be made at a later time;

there were to be no renovations undertaken on the existing house

while people were still living there.

At first, the hypothetical structure was planned to end up as a

so-called capped-off cellar hole. A full foundation would first be

built; then, a deck and roofing material would be placed over that

until time and money allowed a superstructure to rise over all. Under

these circumstances, a further possibility struck me. No where around

the original house wLe any flat grassy areas, that is, lawns. I could

tar and waterproof the proposed new deck to a sufficient degree to

sod it over with six inches or so of loam and grass. Then I could

step right out my front door onto a scrupulously flat stretch of

lawn which had the added advantage of resting several feet above

the surrounding terrain. Thus could be avoided problems of wash and

burrowing animals. Furthermore, just such a raised deck might soak in

a bit more sunlight than would otherwise be possible on the generally

north facing slope. Add to all this the convenience and utility of

a new garage and workshop resting just beneath the green turf-covered

flat.

But plans changed. After, and for the first time, I finally

managed to come up with a set of drawn plans which my carpenter friend,

Barry, could begin to form into a gray-concrete reality, I decided

to go whole-hog into a fully grown structure. Barry was to get the

foundation in while I was tied up in another job in Boston, and then

the two of us would build the rest of the structure above that. I had

found all throughout the area all sorts of used building materials,

un-used but wrongly cut insulated windows, and a whole barnful of old

timbers. Stories of the construction of that vast addition could

perhaps fill many pages. However, my purpose here is, or should be,

AZ4 t9

E PUr

to tell how the new structure would relate to the old. How, especially,

it would relate to the "wall-zone".

If I ever had a feeling for some 'axis' of either circulation or

dimension running through the old house, its direction would run

the long way, through the original 24-foot length of the cabin. The

original front door opened right into the middle of the extensive

flow of foot traffic from the kitchen/bathroom area into the depressed

living room/woodstove area and back again. With the new addition,

however, it was apparent that the main traffic pattern would be from

the enlarged kitchen area, past the bathroom, through the front door/

connective situation, and into the spaces, large and small, of the

new building. If that was to be the case - as, indeed, it turned

out - then the living room area, with its soapstone heater and its

sixteen-inch lower level, would no longer constitute a major terminus

of the traffic flow. It would become merely a small cul-de-sac off of

it. For a time, it would be a necessary diversion off the main Path

becausL of the need to feed the stone stove with wood. But, total

electric heat was in the works for the complete older section, and that

would obviate many further visits to the stove.

To me, this change ot status of the living room in the circulation

plan implied an opportunityto actually change the function of this

area. I thought now to make the living room area into a real "room",

for once, not just an ill-defined, amoeba-like entity labeled,"area". Following through on this wish would imply a radical change

in the past nature of the "wall-zone". No longer would a feeling

of open-ness and space be so important here because that quality

would have been provided for in the addition. What was more nec-

essary now was privacy and a sense of separation between spaces.

So, Barry and I decided to accomplish several needed improvements

at the same time. One of these was to move the range and the refrig-

erator from the kitchen's rear wall in order to gain some usable

space. Another was to give the living room a sense of detachment from

the rest of the old house, as was described above. Given these aims,

we dismantled the work table and some of the trellis-like shelves.

In their place, we built a six-foot wall not directly down the cen-

ter of the "wall-zone", but on a line closer into the living room.

This cut into the sunken area somewhat, so when the new wall got to

the center column, it made a turn back towards the kitchen. This

seemed to have the effect of giving a certain feeling of enclosure

to the kitchen area, not necessarily a bad result. The turn thus

completed provided a natural niche into which I could shove the re-

frigerator and range. The wide eight-foot double step down towards

the soapstone stove remained but now opened from a new corridor-

like space outlined by the path connecting the old kitchen and the

new addition. This seemed a more natural orientation for the old

lowered area, partially because the corridor could act as a service

route to bring wood into the stove from the addition. All these changes

were stimulated by the construction of a wall which, even with its

final turn, ran to a full length of not quite ten feet. Neither did

it attain a full floor to ceiling height, being cut short six feet

above the level of the kitchen floor.

A bright idea struck me as to how to make use of the small space

remaining between the top of this wall and the ceiling. I placed

there two rheostate-controlled fans, making sure to shim them well

with vibration absorbing pads. With these fans, I planned to facili-

tate the passage of warmed air from the woodstove over the new wall

into the remaining areas of the old section, particularly up into the

loft area. As I said, a bright idea, but one not remarkably successful.

I had forgotten to include in my calculations the need for a return

air duct. Thus, as a device to improve heat circulation, the twin

fans were a failure. The system, however, did have one redeeming fea-

ture. It could very rapidly clear the air of smoke, say, from an

overdone casserole. In fact, it could do this in record time. It was

necessary only to open two windows, one behind the fans, the other out

in front somewhere. The fans were then tuned up to a turbo-prop pitch,

and out whooshed the foul air. In a matter of seconds. And, if it was

cold enough outdoors, the ambient temperature inside dropped in a

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similar period of time.

Meanwhile, the other side of the new wall, facing into the

living room, was converted into a safe harbor for wayward books and

magazines. A heavy three-by-eight column already rose from the basement,

its previous function there being to support the framing system of the

sunken floor when it had been installed almost a year before. Now,

as the column passed up by the rough-sawn pine cladding the new wall,

it formed a good barrier against which to run bookshelves. On one

side of the thick section of wood were merely shallow shelves for

large photos, magazines, and the like. This whole set-up remained

until several days ago from this writing. What happened next will

be mentioned in the concluding section of the thesis.

The following winter, of 1971-72, it occurred to me to increase

even further the privacy of the sunken living room, for now it was

serving more often as a bedroom. Accordingly, the wall of the pre-

vious summer took another turn. This continued the original intention

of spanning the width width of the old house and cut off the living

room still more. If I then turned the wall back a bit, now into the

living room cum bedroom, I would form another niche. This one would

correspond to the one on the other side of the wall, which currently

housed the range and refrigerator. In this new niche, I could put

deep shelves to store clothing and other personal items relevant to

a bedroom. All this was done, but the wide step down into the sunken

area maintained its original eight-foot dimension so that the upper

shelves facing the bedroom could be utilized more easily. These new

meanderings of the wall, unlike those immediately preceeding, encom-

passed the whole dimension between the floor and the ceiling. This

naturally allowed for more shelf space and increased whatever po-

tential there was in this space for privacy. But, in addition, a more

important aim was accomplished, for it appeared that some additional

roof support was needed once the connection was made between the

large addition and the smaller house.

The summer following this winter's work saw the fitting out of

the grand addition with fully enclosed bedrooms. These were more con-

I&A2227

servative than the earlier spaces, and made me think about what I had

just done in the way of adding privacy to the older living room/bedroom

in the small house. It seemed that my effort there was superfluous.

These thoughts I mulled over for quite a while because I did not want

to rip down a piece of work I had just put up. It would almost seem

that the whole thing had been a mistake in the first place. Philo-

sophically, it seemed to me that every past effort should at least

leave some small imprint on the present. Thus, to maintain my philo-

spohical integrity, I decided to let the new shelves be, and also the

last inward (vis-a-vis the living room/bedroom) turn of the wall. This

would support the shelves and also support the roof. Therefore, only

one stretch of the floor-to-ceiling wall need come out. This would

open up the room again to some extent and have the added benefit of

allowing the shelves to be used from both sides of the "wall-zone".

The new deep shelves had been almost completely useless before except

for tae very front edge, for they had been at a level too high from

the sunken floor. Even the availability of the eight-foot step had

prved to be of little help, since it was very difficult to keep

balance on it when reaching far overhead.

Furthermore, and need it be added, removing the relatively new

section of wall would act to strengthen the visual relationship be-

tween the now-a-living-room space, then-a-bedroom space, and the rest

of the older section, including the kitchen area. This latter space

had just undergone an enlargement of its own, using the concrete

masses described so many pages ago. A large kitchen like this one

seemed to draw and make a pleasant gathering place for many more

people than did the old cramped one. This had one important implica-

tion for the sunken area: persons finding themselves in the kitchen

often wanted to amble over to this nearby area to withdraw from the

noise and bustle of cooking, washing, etc. Then these same persons,

or perhaps others, once seated by the comfortable warm stove did not

want to move, but also did not want to lose track of the goings-on

in the kitchen. Thus, I felt that the place had to be opened up a bit.

In many ways, the four years of my tenure in this abode repre-

sented an 'epicycle' which had itself turned 360 degrees while

at the same time it was engaged in a journey around another, larger

wheel. This larger wheel represented a thirty-year cycle which had

now come around almost a full swing. The little cabin, now a house -

squiggles of walls here, a nub of a loft popping out there, a huge

blob of an addition oozing out the front door - this almost living

and breathing organisms has again the same open plan it had all those

years ago.

It may sound as though the structure, itself, had some sort of

inner motivation which was somehow determined to express itself.

Perhaps so, yet not in a literal sense. Every move or change in the

cabin was made with what I thought was a rational reason behind it.

The reason was always my own reason, even if some prior compromise

had to reached with someone else's reason, request, or opinion.

Therefore it is I, the designer, to use the old terminology, who

seenis to have been holding to an inner course, if not precisely

an inner motivation. This inner course seems to have been inspired

by the conjuncture of my lifestyle and the physical attributes of

the building, itself. In one way, this situation is fortunate, since,

for the forseeable future, I will be the one who lives there. In

satisfying others who may have rented or lived in the house, it has

come to seem that I have been really satisfying myself once again,

for I have never actually regretted a design move I made ostensibly

to fit another's purpose.

But it would be useful to have a technique whereby these inner

reactions a person has to their particular setting could be more open-

ly and directly explored. By this time, I tend to believe that, given

the existence of some of the particular physical attributes of the old

house, I would always react to them in almost the same manner. That is,

of course, if it were always in my province to react or to change or

to manipulate the house as I wanted. For, even though the new addition

now presents a very large space for my use, I still want the open-

ness of the older section to remain. I give as my reason for this

opinion that it would not feel right to step from the new large space

of the addition to a cramped space in the older side. So, one can

U

almost assume that, no matter what other circumstances may have

come to exist, that old section, with its "wall-zone", would have

inevitably come around again to an open plan. In some way, it was

"in the cards", given the reaction between myself as a personality

and that particular house as a physical environment.

Now, I do not want to make more of the inevitability of this

reaction than necessary. But, suppose that it were even partly true.

Then I, for one, would like to know about it and know about it be-fore I went off designing in half a dozen other directions. In

other words, a certain amount of self-knowledqe would have been

useful under the circumstances.

Thus, we get to the movie, "Diane". For from this film a great

deal of knowedge was generated in a unique way about and for the sub-ject of the work and the makers of it. It is the story of one, par-

ticular person who experienced a violent, depressive reaction to the

change of physical and social environment she experienced when she

moved from South Dakota to New York City. I do not feel it is impor-

tant here to describe the specifics of her backround and the detailsof what did or did not happen to her in New York. This is not to

censor the content of the film, but to direct our focus more to the

making of it. For, in brief, the film is instructive to the outsider

who views it, and, as I mentioned, it also said a great deal to

its subject and to the people who shot it.

What went on here was an attempt by several persons to interpret

the troubled life of another person by producing a kind of biograph-

ical document about that life. The words were the subject's words, and

many of the shooting locations were ones which she suggested to the

film-makers. Some of these related to Diane's style of life and dress

as a semi-successful New York model; how and where in the city shesometimes found herself; and even included a put-on cocktail party

Diane threw for the purposes of the film.

After the New York location shots, we cut into the film previous-ly shot scenes from the other, past environment to illustrate

the comments she was making about that other life. And, during

certain verbal descriptions of the past life, we would cout back to

visual scenes of life in New York. An important point was that it

was not necessary to be explicit about the connection between what

we interjected into the film and the particular words and memories

Diane used when she spoke about some aspect of her present or past

life. We reacted to her words with our reactions. The difference

between the two types of reactions was that we were using visual and

audial motifs which by themselves would not have had particular

relevance to the observations our subject was making about the people

or places around her. She was reminiscing, while we were more or

less throwing together odd bits and snatches of images and sounds.

All this led to a greater, at least different, truth or view

of Diane's life situation. At the time of the film, that greater

or added dimension led everyone concerned with the production to a

fuller view of the differences between the country and the city and

the way we individually reacted to one or the other. It is possible,

in retrospect, that it was the act of seeing and hearing flat, stark

statements about real-life experience appearing on celluloid which

led to the additional dimension of the portrait. Not that the film

was in any way a sentimental tear-jerker. Aside from the somewhat

sardonic, or wry, or at times self-deprecating statements about her

life, there were few, if any, overt sentiments expressed. A few

such affects, however, were added by the film-makers.

The film comes across the way it does, I think, because it is

intensely personal and revealing of a state of mind without seeming

narcissistic or clinical to the point of irrelevance or boredom. What

gives it its wider appeal is the collaborative effort of the subject

who made the statements and the film-makers who reacted with their own

images.

How like a parallel to a classical, couch-bound psycho-analysis

this may sound. Here is the patient on the couch (on the screen) who

describes an incomprehensible segment of a dream (a memory from

South Dakota). The analyst does not try to explain or interpret at

first, but he reacts to it in his own mind. He carefully follows his

further reactions as they proceed. Whatever associations come up in

connection with this or that statement of the patient, the analyst

will note and then express some of them outloud for the patient to

hear and to react to further. Presumably, of course, the analyst,

through his or her own analysis, is supposed to be sufficiently free

of hangups so that the spoken response to the dream segment will

relate to the patient's expressed bit of data. And now we are back

to one of the fundamental holdings of the thesis: that people are

generally alike enough to each other in basic ways, so that they can

help each other expose important facts and perceptions previously

hidden to themselves.

Rather than discussing it in detail, I would rather show the

film to an audience and let the viewers draw their own conclusions

about how and whether it may be relevant to this thesis. One reason

for this feeling is that after the shooting sessions in New York and

the initial editing, my personal participation in making the film

practically came to an end. Some personal squabbles had come between

us, the makers of the film. As a result, beyond the knowledge of

the origin of certain general situations in the film, the "reactions"

to Diane's words and descriptions as expressed in the film were

not specifically my own, although they were all culled from footage

which I had helped to make. At the scale of the minute detail of the

final editing, the "reactions" were those of one of my ex-partners.

Therefore, I can describe the theory behind our making of this type

of film, and, to an extent, I can sit back and judge how well the

theory was followed and how well it worked out in terms of its objec-

tive. But, as I say, it would be very difficult for me to discuss

the fine-grain, two or three second editing decisions which really

consitute the film as it appears on the screen.

However, I can and will try to follow through on a similar exer-

cise of my own. It will be in a medium other than film, the one of

narrative fiction. In some ways, the aims of the two exercises are

similar, to investigate the interaction of people and their environ-

ment in novel ways. But, otherwise, the orientations of the film and

the written scenario which follows are greatly different. The film,

in my opinion, really tries to focus primarily on the person first

and then her traumas and frustrations relating to her environment.

The narrative writing, on the other hand, wants to deal with the

environment as its main subject and only incidentally with a specific

individual. The narrative seeks to use the characteristics and

activities of an individual, in this case a fictional one, as a

means of illuminating and predicting difficult or unsuccessful fea-

tures of a planned, but as yet unbuilt, physical environment.

Thus, I think we are prepared to enter Part II of the thesis.

END OF PART I

A DESIGNER PREPARES: EXPERIMENTS IN METHOD DESIGN

Part Two

IX

Six vellum sheets sit before me depicting in some detail

a mulli-use development on the site of the old Watertown Arsenal.

A cursory overview of the drawings tells me that there are three

separate and distinct built-up zones planned for the forty-seven

acres. Spreading around and beyond these zones is an open space

which has in it paths, roads, green areas, and poskets of forest

and brush. Also found in the open space is a large shed-like struc-

ture servings as a place for covered recreational activities.

As I do much writing and thinking in the open, anonymous

spaces of the Boston Public Library, I take with me there reduced

reproductions of the original plans. These glossy white photo-

stats I am studying now and I must say that they are small and

eyestraining. The six shiny prints measure only about eleven by

eighteen inches. The originals from which these copies were made

are more than twice the size of these. Their lines are thicker and

more intense, making them much easier to read than their minaturized

copies. The scales of the drawings on the originals ranged from

200 feet represented by one inch of drawn line all the way up to

four feet to the inch. But the reproductions now spread on the

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library table are yet again half this size. Thus, opening my five

fingers on the site plan, I note that the span between the thumb

and little finger covers very nicely the two thousand running feet

of building, road, and grass lying innocently beneath. A similar

stunt tried on the land-use plan of sheet number one and drawn to

a scale half that of the site plan buries the whole Arsenal and

most of the surrounding neighborhood easily under my hand.

Enough, for now, on the phenomenology of the designer's plan

drawings; better, more on what I propose to do with them. I see my

whole purpose in this project manifesting itself finally and uniquely

in the act of making changes in my drawings. To me, this is what it

all comes down to. These drawings must be improved somehow to make

them more responsive to the persons who might live or work in this

place if the drawings were ever realized physically. If this state-

ment bespeaks my primary purpose, then a primary question I must raise

is: how shall I go about making these changes and improvements?

What standards can I use? To whom can I go for reaction and feedback

except to other professionals or community groups or zoning boards,

etc? I lament, why is there no Everyman apartment dweller or store

clerk who can speak for his or her peers and unflinchingly declare,

"Yes, the position of the door in that hallway looks good, and I

know it will work for me." Or he may retalliate, "No, a stairway

starting here and going there is little short of blasphemous."

There simply are no such ombudsmen to take on the client's role.

The designer may never know precisely who his client is or will be.

If he does know, it is unlikely the client will perceive and react

to the signifigant details of the plan. We went through this many

pages ago. The conclusion: I, the designer, will be the judge and

jury here. Once the planning guides, the local ordinances, and the

manuals of good and standard practice have been consulted, it will

be up to me, Mr. Everyman's personal designer.

And should this not be so? Should not the arrangements and

the mitifs, the subtlties of design as well as the more obvious, be

67

left to a professional, cultivated sense of taste and order? Once,

almost ten years ago, while I was earnestly and naively trying to

absorb the fundamentals of classical music composition, my teacher

made a telling remark. He said that, in the end, all that separated

the great works of music from the merely competent boiled down to

the degree of the composer's sense of taste. "Taste is all", he

pontificated. Lest we forget, a well-known composer of architectural

"music", himself considered one of the greats, has let it be known

to all who cared: "God is in the details". And why not, one is

tempted to ask. An answer, perhaps crass, that the modern age gives

is that people do not inhabit great works of music but inevitably

end up living and working in pieces of architecture, great or

otherwise.

But the question of taste should not be merely shunted aside,

left only as an egocentric concern or attribute of the so-called

artist. There may be other good reasons than just the ones of

aesthetic cleverness or ingenuity which influence those works -

whether of music or architecture - thoughtful persons might refer

to as "great". That much overused term may have little or no meaning

for us today, but the concept of "taste" may yet have value for our

discussion. For it seems a good word to describe a certain distilla-

tion of degree-of-fit some given human project has when it attempts

to answer some perceived human need. The need may be for a new

shelter or for a new configuration of words or musical notes. It may

not be a need which is necessarily crying out for want of an answer;

no one may ever have realized the need existed before it suddenly

came to light when an accidental act fulfilled it. Whatever the source

of the need, to me, what is critical is the quality of the response.

Does the response fit the need or doesn't it? A next proposition

would logically have it that any serious or important need must be

met or fit by an appropriately serious response. In terms of an

architectural problem, a need merely defined and thus delimited

by a made-for-the-masses specification can hardly be dealt with

by a serious, let alone original, response. So it would seem.

Given the concerns discussed here and at the start, my job

is to make a fitting response to a basic set of needs. The context

of my attempt is the more general problem of what to do with the

site of the Watertown Arsenal. Specifications and recommendations

have already sifted down to me via official pronouncements

accompanied by professional surveys and projections. Much of these

have been accounted for in my first set of plans, the ones which

are now to be operated upon. I want my new set of plans or at least

a few small parts of them to really fit any human life which might

someday come to inhabit the built place. In other words, it is

time to inject some "taste" into my responses.

I,3w is one to accomplish this? Following below are some notes,

reported here verbatim. They positively blew from the electric

typewriter during a recent 60-second barrage of brainstorming:

"The next step will be to take a try at investigativeimagination. I have at my disposal a landscape which must bepeopled and lived in. I must imagine a person or set ofpersons, and then, given the constraints and possibilitiesof the "landscape" depict their lives in it in as real a wayas possible. Details must come, where possible, from therealm of this given "landscape". Nothing can be added ad hocto explain this or rationalize that. No deux ex machina ofoutside circumstance. Also, wherever possible, action, motion,direction - all must derive from the landscape of the plan. Todelineate what grows from it and what is motivated fromstimulus outside it - that is an important distinction tomake. A novelist's approach is called for: here, the storyyou are telling depends for its sense of versamilitude onthe details of backround, of landscape. It is also a novelexperiment, to characterize the backround, to make it thefigure against the ground of the people who have come to inhabitit."

c69

X

Samuel Noahswood.

Sam Noahswood stretched and glanced at himself through the

rear-view mirror. He took a comb from his pocket and ran it twice

through his hair. When the traffic light suddenly changed, he

replaced it hurriedly in his breast pocket and prepared to move on.

Driving out Storrow Drive from his State Street office had O/A4 /,AK/Nnot been a long journey, but a gritty breeze had caught up with

him as he got onto the Soldiers Field Road section of the highway.

Feeling his mussed hair, he quickly wondered where he should park

his coupe in the massive five-story garage waiting for him at the

end of his trip. He could leave it there in Level Three for the

present and move it up top later in the evening. He would like to

leave topside in the first place for he found it extremely un-

pleasant to start a new day off by making his way around and through /7-? C/AC(/*IrOM /,VrR/OW

the damp concrete layers of the garage. And there would be no need ! d/VX73 /4f W44V)4of shelter the next morning, he decided as he glanced at the clear

sun declining westward over the river.

The next light blinked green at the corner of Greenough Boule-

vard and Soldiers Field. Sam drove swiftly through the interchange

onto the next stretch of highway. There were no median barriers here,

and his view of the dark river water on his left was unobstructed.

He felt cooler, too, a phenomenon which almost always occurred at

this point. He had noticed it when he first started following this

route on his return trip to Watertown. That had been at the beginning

of the summer. Perhaps, he thought, the coolness had to do with the

way the wind came over the water now that his route had shifted

northerly following the intersection. He was still driving beneath

the late afternoon sunlight here, bit it was nothing compared to

the Storrow Drive section. At 5:30 on a summer's afternoon, that road

seemed to Sam one of the hottest he had ever traveled. There, he

drove due west and the sun beat on him through the windshield in

hot liquid waves. Now, on Greenough, the traffic was lighter, and

a coolness seeped up to him from the river. Sam sometimes associated

this quality of sudden chill with the dankness of the garage to

which he was now headed.

The sparser traffic here and less direct rays of the sun

allowed Sam to notice some familiar vehicles traveling near him

on the road. These were some of his fellow parkers in the cement

monolith, he realized. And this brought his thoughts back to the

parking situation. Why park on Level Three to begin with, he asked

himself. He was only going to want to move the car away from there

later. But he knew the answer to that one. It was the same conclusion

he had come to for the better part of the past week. He knew exactly

what was going to happen. Parking near one of the steel firedoors,

he would quickly leave the dingy subterranean atmosphere of the

covered level. He would enter a low concourse area of shopfronts,

benches, and small exhibition stands. A pleasant change from the

garage, he would note. Evetually, he would make his way to one of

the elevators. But, before ascending into his residence tower, he

would make sure to pass one of the stores in particular. It was a

small boutique wedged in between two larger chain stores. In the

window of the boutique were hanging strands of colored trinkets and

weird little amulets. Small plastic boxes with flashing lights in- 7side a translucent face sat on a shelf beneath. Five days ago, Sam

had noticed a new employee bending over into this display space.

She had been busily arranging a straight row of little pastel

candles along the bottom of the window.

Sam first saw her as he was rushing past the boutique to get

to the food market at its side. He had hastily come down from his

eighth floor apartment to gather up a few spices necessary for an

omelet he wanted to prepare. The fact that his blond guest upstairs

anxiously awaited his return did not prevent Sam from deciding to

hesitate a few extra seconds before the window of the boutique. During

those seconds, he made a mental note to himself to do more of his

7/

shopping on that floor.

Entertaining a similar train of thought each day since, Sam

made a temporary home for his little coupe every afternoon on the

third level. This intention came to him at approximately the same

instant each time during his drive home: just as he turned right off

of Greenough onto Arsenal Street. It was also when the three

towers of his particular residence/shopping/parking complex hove

into his view. Traffic always slowed here as other vehicles converged

onto Arsenal Street. Although many of these were headed into Water-

town Square, Sam was again able to pick out vehicles he recognized

as having the same destination as he.

But, if he recognized the cars, he also realized that he probably

did not know the persons driving them. For the five-tiered parking

structure served many more than only the residents of the apartments

and condominiums physically attached to it. And there were many

of these ranked just across the concourse levels or stacked above

the garage in towers. Most of the residents Sam did know well enough

to nod at when he met them in the elevators or shops or in the garage,

itself. However, there were other low clusters of dwellings to the

south of it and yet others grouped atop a low flat structure immediate-

ly to the west. The residents of these also used the parking facility.

To make matters more difficult, some of Sam's fellow parkers were

always pulling into the garage just as Sam would be driving out each

weekday morning. These were the proprietors and sales people employed

in the concourse shops, and perhaps a few of their early customers.

Sam was aware of all these people mainly because he knew

the cars if not the drivers. The faces he met in the vast gray

spaces of the garage were seldom familiar to him. Once in a while,

a lively feminine profile he happened to spot on one of the many

tennis courts of the development he would see again elsewhere. She

would be walking perhaps along one of the concourse levels adjoining

the garage. But now the lithe young figure of the Saturday sunshine

would be hidden beneath a pressed business suit. Her once fresh

complexion was here turned garish beneath the intense storefront

71

display lamps.

These casual, disappointing failures or shocks of recognition

did not really bother Sam so much. No, it was more the young male

strangers he encountered sometimes in the parking garage. This was

the other side of the coin of living in the midst of so many attrac-

tive young females, he often reasoned. For they were sought after by

men other than just the ones who, like Sam, lived within easy

shooting distance. He could never decide when he noticed a slightly

disheveled person hovering around a shiny new sports car whether

this person belonged here or not. Perhaps he was one of a bunch of

kids down from the Square who had come here to have some fun. On

the other hand, perhaps not.

A J-Q -P 4 e s' P4 0 1 1"

A large number of Sam's neighbors were in the same well-appointed

boat he was. Mostly young people in their twenties or thirties,

they held good jobs in the downtown law offices and insurance com-

panies. Most had their own bright little compact autos, and a

stereo system, and skis, and whatever else there was of the para-

phenalia common to those leading a life ascendant. And this left

Sam, slong with most of the young persons he knew in this develop-

ment, living in what he could only call a well-heeled ghetto. There

was working class Brighton just over the river on one side, while

working class Watertown squatted on the other side, just up Arsenal

-13

Street. On the south was the river, which was a consolation; but,

on the north, was highway and seemingly endless industrial land-

scape. He remembered the real-estate advertisement in the Sunday

Globe:"A Brand New Funfilled Multi-use Community Just For The

Young Funloving Modern American." He quickly noted the address:

Arsenal Street, Watertown. Arsenal Street. The name was particularly

descriptive. Another description of their isolated position was

an island surrounded by hostile straits.

These thoughts were on Sam's mind as he made a quick left

off Arsenal and swung through the west gates of the development.

He drove slowly past a hundred feet of low shrub bushes, then

stopped, flicking his turn signal to right. A red convertible

just leaving the garage turned and drive past him on its way out

to the street. He waited for it to pass sitting in the shade of

the high parapets of the parking structure. Sam felt a quick fore-

taste here of the cool dankness of the inner layers of the garage.

He now turned in to it and became engulfed for a few seconds

in gloom until his eyes became used to the pale, low-contrast

setting. He continued past the rows of parked vehicles to the

ramp. Through the clerestory windows on his right, he could see

shafts of sunlight slanting down on the rushing traffic of Arsenal

Street. On his left and continuing into the garage structure was

deepening gloom. It was puncuated only by chrome trim flashing

reflections from the street. He got to the ramp and negotiated

a series of short twists and straightaways until he spotted the

huge red figure three of his level. Recently he had sometimes felt

trapped in this sequence of wheel-turns. He saw himself spiraling

endlessly up to the left, finally alighting on a level overlooking

the whole world. He knew his attention always strayed on the way

up the ramp. Coming down was more of a challenge, more dangerous

as he let his speed increase in stabs and jerks. It was also more fun.

Sam maneuvered around the narrow lanes of the third level until

he found an open space somewhere near the exit door he wanted. He

pulled into it, turned off the ignition, and, gathering his brief-

case up by the handles, he got out of the coupe. As he fiddled with

his car keys, he made out a crouching figure about fifty feet

away. He quickly thought, here was that problem again, how to

deal with strangers, how to know which reaction to them was the

right one. It boiled down to the question of how to know them

for who they were or what they wanted. These thoughts passed

through his mind as he pretended to fumble with his car keys

for a few seconds longer. Perhaps that youthful Brando-type

over there by the Volvo was a car thief awaiting his departure

before springing in to action. On the other hand, perhaps he

was only a new playmate of one of Sam's own evening companions

of the week before.

This latter intuition made the point for.Sam, and he gave

up his speculations. How could he ever know who the hell anyone

was around here? Letting the matter pass, he dropped his keys

into his suit pocket and walked on. He approached the red steel

firedoor, conscious of his deliberately calm steps. He was now

thinking about another related problem which often bugged him

about this place: its rampant incestuousness. Here they all were,

less than a thousand people living on almost fifty acres. But

the combinations and permutations they found and made with each

other seemed endless. This question seemed all the more irksome

to Sam when he sometimes stood alone gazing idly from his eighth

floor living room. His glance would cover the river moving in

the near distance and the suburbs stretching out to the south and

west. Now he would sense again that there were moats all around

this handsome new island of concrete. There were the roads, the

industrial wastelands, the nondescript triple-decked working

neighborhoods.

And we go and return to this island, he would think. We

are stuck here with each other. And with our charming little

boutiques and our fashionable stores and our private clubs.

And in the monotonous, vaguely fevered round of the same tennis

artners, drinking companions, lovers....

He thought, there were other islands like this one all

around the city and scattered through the suburbs. Sam wondered

/v9~o4R #'9/ ana%.*

74-1

always ended up admitting to himself that this was as good a place

as any. The rent was affordable, it was clean, there were many

facilities. And, he mused, with certain kinds of jobs', you have

to say you live at certain kinds of addresses. You had to get an

image across to your clients. The chain of thoughts on this subject

usually terminated at this point. There could be no return in

carrying it too far.

One relief to this feeling of forced seclusion Sam often

felt was the presence of the river. Many warm Sunday afternoons,

he found himself walking idly along the shore, reminded that

this -as one of the most important reasons that he had moved here.

The Charles flowed placidly past the banks of the development,

coming from the southwest somewhere. The slightly rank-smelling

water continued then past Watertown, and appearing to drive a

thickening wedge between the shores of Boston and Cambridge,

eventually made its way to the bay. To Sam, and, he assumed, to

many others here, the river was a true godsend. It seemed to

touch their sequestered island as it came and went from them. It

brought lives other than their own to its shores.

The residents of the developments could see the river when

they were many miles away high up in their Boston offices. They

merely had to hesitate a few seconds to gaze out an inoperable

skyscaper window. From either office or home, Sam, himself, saw

there a continuity and a flow: rowing crews glided silently up-

stream and back down during late Spring afternoons. In the

summer, strolling along the shore, he could notice string green

plants and sodden branches moving by at a pace much slower than

the clouds overhead. When the active life of the development's

clubs and little discoteques wasn't calling him, Sam often pondered

on this natural circumstance beneath his window. He felt fortunate

to have a riverview apartment, although he realized many of his

friends would have opted for a flat on the tower's opposite side.

They wanted to see the lights of Boston, they would tell him. But

he could never understand why they wanted to look right back on

the place to which they had just sold eight hours of their life.

A fascination with evil, he supposed, and he left it at that.

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Sam Noahswood yanked open the heavy, steel-jacketed fire door

and walked through the doorway. He left behind the low gray cavern

of parking level three. A new world of colors and lights struck him

as he crossed the threshold. Carmine tiles of quarried stone covered

the floor. Above him, a latticework of thin wood strips was suspended

from the ceiling. A dark void was behind the wood strips, but here

and there, intense spotlights pierced the blackness. They created

fuzzy circles of light on the patterned floor. Somewhat straight

ahead of him, Sam could see the hazy orange light of the passing

afternoon through large plate glass windows.

He walked quickly past display windows brightly lit and ringed

with cosmetic bottles and shaving gear. These were on his right

side. On the left, an alcove broke the parallel length of lighted

displays. There was a circular counter in the center of this al-

cove, a young woman standing in the middle of it. Her back was

turned to Sam, but he could see that she was busy distributing

cigarette packs in a rack beneath the glass counter top. Beyond

the alcove, the wall of display windows continued as before. Now,

neatly arranged on shelves behind the glass, were pairs of boots

and cowboy skirts and jackets with tassles hanging from their seams.

From both sides of the corridor and from above, the intense

light of the spotlights streamed down on Sam. He felt rather than

saw an oppressive difference between these hot yellow spotlights

and the warm dusty afternoon light he could see ahead through the

plate windows.

He was leaving now the corridor from the garage exit. He stood

for a moment at the junction where the corridor joined the main

concourse. From this point, Sam could look through the large win-

dows over the roofs of the housing clusters just before him. A

77

dusty haze hung in the distance over the suburb of Newton. Turning

around, he could see the length of bright display windows and the

spotlights randomly deployed in the wood strip ceiling. Now Sam

could define the curious depression he felt whenever he stepped from

the garage into the bright lights and saw the glowing panoramic

windows ahead. The fact was, he just did not want to be inside this

building on a fine afternoon. The view from the glowing plate- 7glass ahead tantalized him, the spotlights warmed him. He wondered, 4why couldn't he just step through the great transparent pane into

the real thing. He had had enough such teasing throughout the day

from the large tinted windows of his office building.

Enough. There was something he had to do. He headed to his

left now and started down the concourse. On his right for a short

distance continued the plate glass windows. Sam did not study

the view they presented although he was aware when they ended and

he was again enclosed on both sides. A few feet beyond this point,

Sam knew to angle his path a bit into the center of the

concourse. A constriction took place here. On the right were the

doorways into two apartments forming finger-like abutments off

the concourse. Protecting the doorways from the foot traffic along

the concourse was a screen jutting perpendicularly out from the

wall. Just opposite this protuberance on the other wall were the

doors of the elevators. There was often one or two persons with

bundles in their arms standing before these doors. Sam knew they

were usually waiting for an elevator up or down to another concourse

floor. Once in a while, he recognized one of the persons

standing there as a neighbor of his up on one of the floors of the

tower. If this person did not have too much to carry he or she would

usually have a key in their hand. This was because only residents

of the towers could open the elevator doors on a tower floor. And

when several of the residents were fumbling with their keys and

their packages and their brief cases as the elevator ascended in

jerks and stops, a standard joke would arise among them. Someone IT

would remark sardonically how they had always wanted to be a member

of an exclusive key club. A short laugh or a rueful groan was the

usual response.

So Sam steered his way past the doorway screens and the

waiting people. In more thoughtful, less hurried, moods, he would

sometimes note that there were two sides to this problem of obstacles

in the path of rapid pedestrian traffic of the concourse. They were

definitely a pain in the neck, especially on a crowded weekend after-

noon and he was in a hurry to get up to his apartment to shave and

shower. On the other hand, the little knots of waiting people pro-

vided some relief and sense of scale to the four hundred foot long

throw of the concourse. Sam could see the little swarms of waiting

people up in front of him and then he knew roughly how far he had

to go to his elevator. He could estimate by the size of these knots

whether he would have much wait for a cab going up or down, and

he could plan any last second stops on the concourse. All the little

people spread along the giant's yardstick, he would comment to him-

self.

Sam took a certain professional pride whenever he felt himself

able to make what he thought was an objective observation about the

building he lived in. It and many other parts of the develoment

were many times the topic of end of the day conversation in one of

the little bars scattered through the concourse levels. Sam knew that

many of the residents now considered themselves amateur architec-

tural critics. They thought it their privililege as they were the

first generation of occupants within the new complex. They would sit

around discussing this feature or that, and many times Sam thought

that he or a companion had come up with a very shrewd comment. The

comments were often right on the nose because, he estimated over a

beer, they were all based upon personal experience. Sam also knew

that none of the architects of the building were among the residents

of the towers of his complex, so he was unlikely to become engaged

with them in conversation. There was one other similar complex on

the fifty acre development, several thousand feet away. Sam doubted

the development architects lived there either. He doubted this

because he knew of no architects whatsoever who lived in either

place. Come to think of it, this was strange because almost all the

79

other professions were represented here, even though there did

seem to be a preponderance in law and business.

Just past the doorways, Sam slowed his brisk pace. Ambling by

a large shoe store on his left, he peered first at one pair set

up on clear plastic stands, then another. Next, he crossed the thirty

foot concourse to survey the view from the plate windows which at

this point had resumed their luminous presence. He walked slowly along

the lengthy panes. Shadows from the apartment towers abuting the

concourse fell across the landscaped paths outside and below him.

He nearly sprawled over a low wooden bench which suddenly cropped

up from nowhere. He decided to sit down and watch the scene a few

seconds.

Sam's eye sought out the small boutique. A number of people

were rapidly passing before his view and he had to shift his head

back and forth to catch any sight of its small windows. A number

of these pedestrians Sam recognized as residents of the complex.

The ranks of outside shoppers had been much thinned. Studiously

avoiding the possibility of meeting, thus having to acknowledge,

someone's gaze, Sam kept his eyes busy and lowered. He pretended

for his own benefit to read some fine print which could be present

in the lower half of the boutique window. He continued this de-

tailed scrutiny until he feared he might be appearing foolish in

the eyes of anyone happening to be watching. If he had to squint

so much to see something, why didn't he just get off his butt and

go look at it? Sam wondered this about himself as though he were

standing in someone else's shoes looking on at this spectacle.

He suddenly felt he might have seemed ridiculous already,

especially to someone watching from inside the darkly lit boutique.

Feeling a surge of embarrassment, Sam slid around on the bench as

though to hold his wristwatch up to the daylight outside. Continuing

this ruse, he figured he might as well check the time. He had

trouble doing this as strong evening shadows slanted across the

window from the west. Sam squinted at the watch. Almost a quarter

to seven. He had better get a move on, he thought, for it was

He hastily got up and crossed the concourse. But he could not

get himself to move directly towards the boutique. First approaching

the food store on the right, he convinced himself to search for

someone he knew inside of it. He side-stepped along in the direction

of the boutique, passing oranges, Danish cheese and then ponderous

waxen sausages suspended in the grocery's window. In a few too short

seconds his eyes came to and traversed the vertical aluminum strip

which marked where the grocery ended and the boutique began. He

slowly side-stepped further, still peering through the glass, his

eyes but a few inches from the cold surface.

Sam saw the girl bending over a glass-topped display case.

She was absorbed in cleaning something very small with a light-

colored cloth. As he watched, she took a small bottle from the

counter and brought it up to the cloth. She tilted the bottle

up and replaced it on the counter. Unaware of the eyes watching

her stealthily through the hanging chains and trinkets in the

window, she carefully went on cleaning the small object.

Sam decided he might as well go in there and get it over

with. He had made overtures toward unknown women before. All it

took was a little casual conversation to break the ice. He

screwed up his courage and broke away from his stance before the

window. He strode briskly to the door of the boutique. He took

hold of the dull gray aluminum handle. The cold of the metal was

quickly felt by his sweating hands. After another infinite instant

of hesitation, he yanked at the door.

He did not quite make it.

"Sam, old buddy! How the hell're you doing? Hey, come on down

and have a little drinky with me. Wait'll I tell you how I did last

night. You see, there was this...."

000--TV - -_V_

11V-4VVV4' !55;7V1?0,oPrRONA7_'!;

It was past nine o'clock.

By the time he got out of the first floor bar, Sam felt that

his talkative chum had all but chewed his ear off. And Sam had

been impatient and cross to begin with. When his friend interrupted

as he was about to enter the boutique, Sam was ready to vent his

nervousness in as explosive a way as possible. Several sound rea-

sons had stopped him. For one thing, his friend would not have

known what was going on. And if he did, all he would have done would

be to tease Sam and laugh at his shyness. Which Sam would also have

done if their roles had been reversed. In short everyone knew

instinctively that they had to learn to live with one another. It

was foolish to be too touchy. Privacy, self interest, and a strict

moral neutrality - these were the great tenets to abide by in this

homogeous community where the golden rule and some elements of jungle

rule were sometimes mixed in weird proportions.

Thus, Sam had been regaled endlessly over scotch and soda in

the little cafe. As he sat there suppressing one yawn after the

next, he wished he could tell his companion some good reason why he

had to leave him. But, since he had been planning - rather, hoping -

that a rendez-vous of sorts could have been worked out with the girl

in the boutique, he felt at a loss to think of some plausible place

to go.

He sat watching the currents of shoppers outside the cafe

gradually diminish as the hour went from seven to eight. At about

8:30, he noticed numerous young couples arriving for the nine o'

clock showing at the cinema. He decided at last that there was no

point in continuing to drink. So he begged off from his friend's

companionship, saying he had an important call to make and was ex-

pecting several others. Sam left the cafe irritated, jealous, and

a little bit drunk.

Walking slowly past the short line of people buying their

movie tickets, Sam added a few twigs of lonliness to his already

considerable bundle of anxieties and vague depressions. He eventually

reached the central pair of elevator doors along the concourse and

studied them a moment before pushing the upper button of the two

before him. He was noticing for the first time that the doors were

clad in a rich shade of stained and varnished plastic.

He pushed the button.

Responding to the heat of his finger, the little round button,

with its translucent arrow pointing to the heavens, lit up with a

reassuring orange glow. A very responsive mechanism, Sam thought.

He wondered, perhaps slightly alcoholically, whether the little

button would be so sensitive if he were not such a warm hearted per-

son. A muffled chime startled him from puzzling over this hypothesis.

Aha, he exclaimed silently, as the elevator doors slid open, my

coach has arrived. And he was suddenly very thankful that no one was

waiting to surprise him in the brightly lit interior.

Crossing the threshold of the elevator cab, Sam blinked sharply

beneath the incandescent glare emanating from the ceiling. The doors

waited respectfully a few seconds before slithering shut with a hum

and a click. Another instant passed and the elevator silently, if not

too smoothly, began to accelerate upwards. As he pushed the button

marked 'eight', Sam distinctly felt that his lower stomach and intes-

tines still wanted a close affinity with the first floor. They seemed

to resist being forcibly removed from it.

Trying to pay no attention to these recalcitrant parts, Sam

impatiently awaited each change in the succession of numbers flashing

above the doors. Two, three, four, five. At five he noticed that

faint strains of recorded music were being piped into the elevator

cab. The parts of his anatomy that Sam been hoping to forget began

piping up to his brain a few faint strains of nausea.

Six, seven. At seven, the cab suddenly decelerated, as though

with a mind of its own. It stopped completely, Sam groaned, and the

doors slid rapidly open. He closed his eyes and waited.

Nothing. The only sounds besides Sam's slightly labored breathing

were some faraway moans from the Muzak. He opened his eyes, saw no one

was there, and reached for the 'close door' button. He pushed it,

and the button answered him with its familiar orange glow, but nothing

else happened. Sam exclaimed a short exasperated oath and pushed

both the 'close door' button and the 'up' button at the same time.

He used only one hand, its fingers outstretched, to do this. With

the palm of the other, he pounded the button cheerily glowing 'eight'.

But the 'eight' button responded poorly to such treatment and

suddenly turned as dark as all its numerical brothers. And the doors

courteously remained open.

With his fingers still on the 'close door' button and the 'up'

button as before, Sam decided to try a new, more stern, tactic with

the unruly 'eight'. He took his palm from it, and balled up his

hand into a tight fist, making sure to leave a very stiff middle

finger protruding. This he then ground ferociously into the dark

elevator button as though that button were the eyeball of some

dreaded fiend.

The button blinked on again. And the doors, apparently in

appreciation of Sam's less than delicate gesture, quickly slid shut.

Gayly, the Muzak swung into a waltz theme from "The King and I".

And once more, with a start, the elevator rose.

Only three seconds later, it stopped again, finally reaching

its destination, the eighth floor. The quick-to-please doors

opened again, and Sam lurched out. He did not feel so bodily sick

now as he felt indignant at the vagaries of the independent-minded

elevator. It had at first seemed so obediant, coming right to his call.

Sam steadied himself for a few seconds as he stood in the hall

before the open elevator doors. They soon closed, making him aware

of the relative dimness around him. The hall, or lobby, was roughly

"T" shaped, the short, squat stem of the "T" beginning from the

twin set of elevator doors. From there, the stem ran about ten feet

before opening right and left into the upper cross-bar of the "T".

Each wing of the cross-bar was about eighteen feet long and twelve

feet wide. In all, the dimensions defined a much truncated "T".

Sam's pupils soon enlarged to scoop in the diminished level

of light. The hallway did not now seem so dingy or dark, merely

very enclosed. Two doors faced him as he stood with his back to

the closed elevator doors. He would eventually go to the left one.

Around each inside corner of the "T" Sam knew there were located

three similar doors. All were finished in the glossy plastic veneer

of the elevator doors. The walls of the hallway were covered with

a light colored paper which had a slight sheen to it. The ceiling

was the same, with three solitary lamps suspended in the two wings

of the "T" and in the stem before the elevators.

Sam slowly walked to the proper door. His tie undone, his right

hand groped in the left pocket of his suit jacket trying to dig out

his keys. Glancing briefly around at all the brown doors, he was not

surprised to see that they were closed. He was disappointed, however,

his habitual curiousity frustrated. Very seldom seldom did one of

his neighbors leave a door casually open, even though every one on

the floor knew each other. Others had told him and once or twice he

had seen that the situation was different on a few other floors

scattered through the residential towers. There the apartment doors

were often left open at reasonable hours, the friendly neighbors

nonchalantly roaming from one apartment to the next. The residents

were nearly always women with perhaps one or two young couples thrown

in. Otherwise throughout the development, unless there were fairly

specific invitations, it was not a normal thing to just drop in a

neighbor's apartment without first loudly knocking.

He had found his key by now and impatiently scratched the tip

of it along the door searching for the keyhole. He could not find it.

The brass knob was there as usual, but try as he might in the

shadow cast from the overhead light fixture, Sam could neither see

nor feel the familiar Jteyhole.

Thinking that perhaps the drinks he had earlier were really

getting to him, he stepped back from the door. The yellow light of

the hall ceiling lamps flooded over the door and adjacent section

of wall. Sam swung his head around and back and muttered another

h~n'x1 IowA J4Ji

2z

oath. This door was a firedoor, not his apartment door. It was

just like the one next to it. First he had to open this heavy

door and then walk past the flight of concrete fire stairs before

he would be standing before the door to his apartment. It was the

same story for the apartment next to his.

Why it took Sam all these months to get used to this arrangement

and still slip like this was a mystery. Perhaps it was because the

fire door and the apartment door, separated by a dingy gray hallway,

represented such an unpleasant and inconvenient nuisance to him.

Only the two center apartments of the eight on that floor suffered

this condition. In more sober moments, Sam also felt almost insulted

by the relative lack of privacy his apartment door gave him consider-

ing that it opened onto the fire stairs.Six of the eight apartment

doors opened onto the "T" shaped elevator lobby, but not his. The

doors of Sam and his neighbor fronted on the same vertical column

of concrete stairs as similarly positioned apartment doors on ten other

floors.

It seemed contradictory. Here he often wished for a better

rapport horizontally with his neighbors on the eigth floor. Yet

he was cut off from them by the twenty foot corridor of the stair P

well. Better, it would seem under these circumstances, for Sam to

strike up an acquaintance with his neighbors above or below. But,

to get up and down there would mean climbing or descending the

damp, echo-filled chamber of the stairwell. The echos were so persistent

in this space that Sam could hear foot steps, and exclamatory greetings

or whispered partings from up and down the eleven story shaft. And

this definitely went against the gardinal tenet of privacy.

Walking through the stairwell just now, he heard no noises

except his own. As he had prepared his key once, it was but a second's -6work to insert it into the keyhole and let himself into his studio

apartment.

Mkgr L4 Auk,

e5050

The door swung open and Sam entered the apartment. He snapped

on the light switch on the wall to his right, and then closed the

door behind him. He put his briefcase down by the closet opposite

the light switch. Walking further down the entry corridor, he re-

moved his suit jacket. Turning right at the end of the short entry

hall, he placed it on a hanger on the near side of a long closet

located just around the corner. Facing this closet, he closed the

right set of folding doors where he had just hung his coat, and

pulled open the left set. There were plates, glasses, and other

dishware on the lower of the shelves found on this side of the

closet and a some food stuffs on the upper. With the foodstuffs

were assorted empty jars and laundry detergents.

Sam reached up and took a tea bag from a wide-mouthed peanut

butter jar full of them. Then he reached below for a cup and saucer.

With these, he walked further past the closet with the two sets of

folding doors and turned right into a small, so-called pullman type

kitchen. He put the tea bag into the cup and put that down on the

saucer on the counter top to his right. He now reached around the

little outcropping of wall enclosing the counter top and flicked on

the kitchen light. The switch was located just outside the kitchen

on the wall next to the long closet. Sam turned from this counter

next to the sink to the one opposite and turned a switch on the

electric range. Rummaging in the cabinet beneath the counter top

between the range and the refrigerator, he found an enameled metal

tea kettle. He turned back to the sink, filled the kettle half full

of water, and then turned back to the range to place it on the now

heated platen.

All these preparations done, Sam felt he could relax the few

minutes it would take the water to come to a boil. He left the ki-

tchen, walking by the small round breakfast table sitting just out-

side of it. He entered the living area which was still relatively

dark. A star field of suburban lights twinkled at him through the

large picture window in the far wall of the apartment. Slowly approach-

ing the window, Sam just missed bumping into the edge of a desk

protruding around the corner which more or less separated the end

of the dining area just outside the kitchen from the living area.

He continued towards the window, passing between two arm chairs,

the one on his left sitting directly before part of the window.

Now he stood before the cool glass. Much of Sam's view was

obscured by reflections from the harsh kitchen and hall lights.

Standing there and gazing out, he felt his head begin to clear a

bit from the alcohol; he felt more relaxed. Newton and the other

southwestern suburbs spread out before him. The view was bounded

by an upper and lower margin of highways. The turnpike just below

was brightly lit but few vehicles were traveling on it. While,

far beyond, Sam could make out the thick streams of white headlights

and red tail lights rushing around the great circumferential high-

way, route 128, ringing Boston. The road was unlighted.

The kettle, with a hollow gurgle, suddenly announced its readi-

ness. Sam turned relunctantly from the window, and started hurriedly

back to the kitchen. As he passed the obtrusive desk, he flicked on

the small TV set sitting on it. Gu shots and sirens immediately

burst into the tiny apartment. Sam cut short his kitchen-bound mo-

mentum and turned back to lower the TV volume. Annoyed, he resumed

his way to the bubbling kettle. The metal lid of the kettle was

clattering a little jig, steam spurting from beneath it, by the time

Sam got there. He quickly took the hot kettle from the range, making

sure to keep the live steam from his wrist and arm. He turned to the

counter adjoining the sink and poured the hot water into the white

tea cupwith its bag resting inside. The bag bloated up immediately,

swollen with warm air and steam. It floated and twirled as the cup

filled with steaming water. A string was tied to the tea bag, at

the other end of which a cradboard tag rested hanging in the cool air

outside the cup. But the bag was bobbing and spinning caught in the

whirlpool of the filling cup and the whole string and the tag at the

end of it flipped over into the hot water. Sam said, Damn it.

He abruptly returned the kettle to the range top. The metal lid

of the kettle clattered like a midget cymbal as the kettle came down

~4&)

LA~c +J At.{Iv4Cf1A~

- &o~c (A0&WA ea,,

hard. With the cardboard tag floating in the steaming cup, Sam

returned to the anxious mood he had experienced before in the

elevator. He thought he had better calm himself down; the tea

would help. Turning back to the sink, he opened a drawer beneath

the counter top to his left and took a teaspoon from the plastic

bin of utensils. He moved over to the right section of counter top

on which the cup sat, the teabag and the morsel of cardboard still

revolving in the water. Sam fished out the cardboard and used it

with the string to retrieve the teabag, which he threw into a small

plastic-lined garbage can in a cabinet beneath the sink.

He went now to the refrigerator at the end of the kitchen

compartment next to the counter adjoining the electric range. Open-

ing the massive, balanced door, Sam leaned over and looked around

for a small container of credm. There was none, and, he saw with

rising irritation, neither was there any milk. A short oath. Giving

up on the lightener, he next went looking for a sweetener. He turned

from the refrigerator after giving the pale enameled door a good slam.

A faint crash reached his ears from within the mechanism. Above the

sink and its adjacent counter tops were hung several small cabinets.

Sam opened one of these and took out a cardboard box of brown suger.

Without even opening the box, he could feel that its contents had

solidified into a brick-like mass. He opened the box and tried to dig

out what he needed with the teaspoon. As usual, he punctured the

box with the spoon, and loose bits of sugar scattered over his hand

and into his cuff.

Sam did not consider himself much of a housekeeper. Partly be-

cause of this, he liked to spread out over the apartment those typi-

cal household accouterments which had to washed, cleaned, dried,

sorted, folded, stacked, and eventually hidden away somewhere. If there

were few such items concentrated in any one location, he would not

have to see them all in order to deal with only a few. That was one

reason Sam kept the dishware segregated from the rest of the mess that Coften accumulated in the kitchen. Another was that it was difficult (5/for more than one person to work in the small kitchen. Therefore, if a

guest were cooking a meal there, Sam, never wis;hinq to appear lazy,

hard. When the cardboard tag jumped into the steaming tea cup, Sam

returned a little more to the anxious mood he had experienced before

in the elevator. He thought he had better calm himself down; the tea

would help. Turning back to the sink, he opened a drawer beneath the

counter top to his left and took a teaspoon from the plastic bin of

utensils. He moved over to the right section of counter top on which

the cup sat, the teabag and the morsel of cardboard still revolving

in the water. Sam fished out the cardboard and used it with the

strinq to retrieve the tea bag, which he threw into a small plastic

lined garbage can in a cabinet beneath the sink.

He went now to the refrigerator at the end of the kitchen com-

partment next to the counter adjoining the electric range. Opening

the massive, balanced door, Sam leaned over and looked around for a

small container of light cream. There was none, and, he saw with

rising irritation, neither was there any milk. A short oath. Giving

up on the lightener, he next went looking for a sweetener. He turned

from the refrigerator after giving the door a good slam. A faint

crash responded from inside the avocado colored mechanism. Above the

sink and its adjacent counter tops were hung several small cabinets.

Sam opened one of these and took out a cardboard box of brown sugar.

Without even opening the box, he could feel that its contents had

solidified into a brick-like mass. He opened the box and tried to dig

out what he needed with the teaspoon. As usual, he punctured the

box with eh spoon, and loose bits of sugar scattered over his hand

and up his cuff.

Sam did not consider himself much of a housekeeper. Partly be-

cause of this, he liked to spread out over the apartment those typi-

cal household accouterments which had to be washed, cleaned, dried,

sorted, folded, stacked, and eventually hidden away somewhere. If there

were few such items concentrated in any one location, he would not

have to see them all in order to deal with only a few. That was one

reason Sam kept the dishware segregated from the rest of the mess that

often accumulated in the kitchen. Another was it was difficult for

more than one person to work in the small kitchen. Therefore, if a

guest were cooking a meal there, Sam, never wishing to appear lazy,

4 11

He retired to the living area. It was still dark except for the

overthrow of the kitchen and hall lamps and the flickering pale light

cast on the rug and furniture by the television screen. He settled

down on the foldout couch across the room from the noisy TV set.

Eventually the couch would become his bed. He would move aside the

arm chair to his left, then lift out the seat cushion from the frame

work of the couch. Presto, with springs twanging and quick bang, a

thin foam filled mattress would pop into view like a ripe fruit.

Throwing on a few sheets and blankets would complete the transforma-

tion of the couch into his king-sized double bed.

However, just now, he did not unfold the bed, only letting himself

down on the folded mattress-cushion of the couch. He tried to focus

his attention on the distant. screen of the TV. A female's voice

brazenly sang out, "What has Sheraton done for you lately?" Not

being sure, Sam's gaze began to wonder about the living room. Small

sounds of sizzling came from the kitchen. Sam contemplated the pheno-

menon of the TV dinner. He thought he saw a similarity between the

way this building was laid out and the arrangement of food within the

frozen tray. There was the Salisbury steak on the bottom of the tray

in that glossy photo on the carton. Ostensibly, that was the big deal

of the dinner. The big red letters said so. But it was little black

letters which described the less important side dishes strung above

the big one. Just so in this huge residential and commercial complex.

The concourse, the recreation clubs, the gigantic parking garage, all

the shops - these made up the Salisbury steak which had lured him

and most of the others to live here.

"Come on, all you little potato nuggets, you peas and you carrots,

and even you apple-cherry compotes. If you sit in a seasoned sauce or

stew insugery syrup, come along. Join big Mr. Salisbury and have a

barrel of fun."

And there they ended up, each in their own walled little compart-

ment, stewing in their invidual juices. Presumably, when and if the

big Salisbury got eaten up somehow, they would go too. They would all

go down together.

Samuel Noahswood suddenly grew very weary. Another commercial

was assulting the TV screen. This time, montages of Hammond Electric

organs jogged around the tube face dancing an electronic polka. He

strectched back on the couch. A soft velvet undertow began tugging at

his consciousness. Weird snatches of make-believe experiences flashed

through his mind. For an instant he saw his face looking up at him

from the shiny reflective surface of the glazed apple-cherry compote.

This made sense to him because he felt just a little bit stewed. The

feeling enlarged, the fruity syrup was dragging him down. He was

caught in an under tow. Down he went, into fitful sleep.

A vast complicated dream began to outline itself in Sam's

befogged mind. There was a giant television screen and Sam was not

just looking at it but through it. An oddly proportioned man stood

by an upright piano which seemed to sprout keys and wires from all

over itself. The man gestured vividly. His swollen, florid face oscilla-

ted forward and back in blurry red motion. The blur was becoming as

formless as the fruit compote on the frozen dinner carton. Endlessly,

the man regaled Sam:

XIV

Hello, out there, Have you seen our new model 7, electronicpiano? With this sumptuously appointed, precision mechanism, you, too,

can make the today sounds of today's generation. You don't have tobe an expert. Or even a half-witted amateur to grind out those jivynotes from the past. Just buy a model 7. I am going to show you why

this instrument is a bargain at even half its monthly cost of just

under $280.60.

Take me, for example. I have never been considered a Chopin. Or

even a Bobby Darin for that matter. Why, when I was younger, I lostmy hearing for a time due to congenital illness. Of course, now,thanks to modern hearing aid technology, I have just been able toqualify for fifty per cent disability pension. But that is anotherstory.

I was about to demonstrate. I approach this simmering wonderbox with a sense of pride and awe. I sit down comfortably on this

This one stands alone.

Eldorado Convertible by Cadillac. The only luxuryconvertible now built in America. The only one.

Here is a car unique unto itself. As an Eldorado, it has asuperb combination of features: the maneuverability of

front-wheel drive, variable-ratio power steering and

Automatic Level Control-coupled with the response of an

8.2 litre engine. Then there's the soft Sierra grain leatherseating, the jewel-like standup crest, the little touches

everywhere that tell you what kind of car this is.

It even converts uniquely. The ingenious Hideaway Topfolds behind the seat for full-width seating in the rear.

And to individualize it further, you can specifya Dual Comfort front seat, a lighted vanity mirror,

steel-belted radial tires, a wide choice of radio systems-andCadillac's new automatic power antenna is also available.

Eldorado, of course, is built by Cadillac. And you know

what that means in the quality of the car. In theprofessionalism of those who sell and service it.

Eldorado Convertible. How many other cars offer

front-wheel drive combined with Cadillac craftsmanship

and Eldorado elegance? Only one. And your authorized

Cadillac dealer has that one, too- the classic Eldorado Coupe.Isn't it time you paid him a visit?

wide, foam-filled, patented couch and reach right under here forthe concealed master switch. It is not just concealed. This switchis disguised! You would hardly know it from your common, burglar-proof, brass padlock. Give it a light pull and all is in readiness.

Naturally, you can't forget to plug in you beautiful newelectronic piano. The only power supply you will ever need forthis exceptional, plastic-coated instrument is your everydaythree-phase, 440-volt, industrial receptacle, suitable for auto-motive punchpresses and other light machinery. We plug the littlebeauty in, and we're all set to go. 0

First, we touch this little button aptly marked 'light rock'.You see it glows at our touch, bringing forth from the instrument'sinner depths a radiant mixture of snare drum, tympani, rhythmglockenspiel, and musical saw.

Then, just for kicks, we'll throw in some mid-sixties Beatlesny just turning up the calibrated yah-yah control. We're reallyswingin'. Compare this delightful music with any Beatles album andsee the difference for yourself.

Now, we simply add the optional tone generator, model 7, priced /at only $34.50. Listen to your yah-yah's come out on any of threedifferent notes. Snap in a little melody and you're in business.We just push buttons 'two', 'three', and 'four' on the separate /$4melody console and we tune in any one of three well-known melodies.

And remember, these are not just any old melodies, but threeof the world's greatest. Honored in the orient and in the occident.You can't go wrong.

What creativity!

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as /5W71

Gray light streamed through the large picture window. Groggily,

Sam lifted himself from the couch. Stabs of aching cramps moved

through his back and into his legs. Pain held his neck and temples

as in a rigid vise. He had trouble clearing his vision, and his

sense of smell told him a very unhappy story.

For a sticky foul stench floated visibly in the air of the

apartment. Layers of it hung soggily like mists over a swamp. The

air was very warm, strata of heat sitting stationary amidst the

smoky clouds. A strident farmer's voice was hurtling sharply .at

Sam from the TV. There was no image to be seen, but the voice said

that lima beans were selling at a new high this morning. Soy bean

futures were low.

As were Sam's spirits. Flailing his arms at the smoke, he made

his way to the talking box and shut it off. He trekked to the kitchen

leaving little curling eddies in his wake. Snapping off the switch

on the range, he did not dare open the oven door. That could wait

until later. He headed now for the patio doors across the dining area

from the kitchen, tying not to trip over the breakfast table or

chairs sitting around it. Reaching the glass doors as though flying

through a cloud, he saw they were smeared with an oily haze of

residue. He yanked one open and stepped onto the porch.

Sam walked to the rail taking a deep breath. By comparison,

the air was much fresher out here, even though he guessed that on

some days there would not be much difference. A very slight green

sweetness wafted up to his nostrils from the river below. It occurred

to him that if he opened the sliding glass door into the living

room as well, some sort of cross ventilation might result. He tried

to pull open one of the clear panels, but it was locked. Why the

door had a lock to begin with a hundred feet above the ground was

one more mystery to Sam. He went back through the dining room area,

around the sharp cornered desk, and snapped open the lock of the

stubborn door. Yanking it fully open, he again stepped onto the patio.

Sam would have liked a more western oriented view from the

outside deck. The exterior side wall of the apartment continued out

beyond the dining area limiting the view toward the west to just

what he could see from the railing. Like blinders on an old milk-

horse he thought. Unfortunately, that left the view from the living

room heading straight into the concrete blinder.

So he stood right at the railing of the deck and sniffed all

around at the morning air. Detecting faint whiffs of incindered

Salisbury steak emanating from inside the apartment, Sam realized

he did not want to stick around there too much longer. He would

wask quickly, change his clothing, and get out of the complex as

soon as he could this morning. He remembered that downtown there was

a reasonable restaurant on Commerce Street where he could get some

eggs and sit undisturbed for an hour and a half with his coffee and

newspaper. Perhaps he might indulge in one petite Bloody Mary to

ease his nerves and muscles.

Yes, he would leave here as soon as possible today and make

sure not to return before late in the evening. If he left the

patio doors open all day, perhaps the place would be aired out

by then. With a certain amount of luck, he need not come back here

at all this night. That would depend on a resurgence of vitality in

his social life. But, in any case, better not to plan on anything

like that. With a small sigh of resignation, Samuel Noahswood

turned back into the smoky interior of his apartment to make

his preparations for the coming day.

"Can you please tell me how to get out to the Watertown Arsenal?"

"Why, surething, young lady. Just take that number 57 bus

standing over there to Brighton Center. When you get there, just

change to a bus to Central Square, Cambridge. Ask the driver to

let you off at the Arsenal and then just walk over the bridge there."

"Thank you, very much," and L.C. (pronounced just like 'Elsie')

walkea from the information booth in the Kenmore Square bus station.

As she headed for the number 57 bus, a somewhat emaciated young man

stepped up to take her vacated place before the glass window.

"How can I get over to Brookline Village?" the youth asked the

bespeckled transportation employee who by now had his nose buried

again in the racing pages. "Excuse me, do you know what bus I should

take to get to Brookline Village?"

"Huh? What's that?", he grunted, peering over the top of the

page at the boy. "How should I know? Go ask one of the drivers over

there."

L.C. boarded bus 57 and sat waiting while the bus filled with

other commuters. When a surge of riders came up from the subway and

filed into the bus, the driver put down his coffee, thumped closed

the front door, and swung out into the thick morning traffic.

The route went up Commonwealth Avenue, passing summer school

students hurrying to their nine o'clock classes. L.C. had a good view

of them from the high window. Until this past June, she had been one

of their number. Now, she was a working girl, a half summer's vaca-

tion just behind her. Up Commonwealth Avenue the bus plinged and

lurched in the weaving traffic. At first, the curbs were lined with

automobile agencies. The, low non-descript store fronts and small

parking lots predominated. Past the Harvard Street intersection, the

wide lawns of a Catholic hospital came into view. Then the street

grew narrow again as the bus turned into Brighton Center.

97

When the bus came to a stop, L.C. got off, followed by several

other passengers. She looked around the crowded intersection for the

bus headed towards Central Square. She did not see it. Asking an older

woman peering into a shop window where the bus usually stopped, she

was diiected to an empty corner diagonally across the street. A bench

was was there, but no waited on it. As the bus ran only every twenty

minuets, L.C. was informed, and one had just left, she would have

some minutes to pass. She decided to investigate any nearby coffee

shops. If it was to be a reoccurring event, this delay between missed

connections, it would be nice to find a place to sit and relax during

the wait. But no coffee shop or restaurant could be found from which

she could keep an eye out for her bus. Making the best of the situa-

tion, she entered a small shop around the corner and ordered a coffee

to take out with her. This she took to the bench at the corner bus

stop and sat there sipping it and she waited.

After about fifteen minutes had passed, a long vehicle with

'Central Square, Camb.' written across its brow glided into the

bus stop, its air brakes squealing at the annoyance of having to

stop at all. Nearly empty of passengers, it stopped lightly and

quickly on its large black tires. L.C. boarded at the front behind

several other people. She paused briefly at the driver's side to

ask him to let her off at Arsenal Street. In a bored tone, he promised

he would do so. Taking a seat towards the middle of the bus, she

glanced through the window at the street outside. It was crowded

with storefronts, glass doors, shop windows, and hanging advertisements,

but very few people walked about. Suddenly, the bus took off towards

Central Square with a muffled roar. And, just a few minutes later,

the driver, his vehicle stopped at a red light, leaned back and sig-

naled to L.C. that her stop had come. She walked quickly to front

of the bus and dropped a quarter into the metal coinbox by the driver.

Mumbling a quick thanks at him, she disembarked from the vehicle. Just

then, the light went green. The bus turned sharply to the right in

front of L.C. and left her standing in a veil of blue haze as it roared

away.

Standing there for a few seconds, she surveyed the short high-

way bridge she would have to cross to get to the Arsenal project.

This was her first day on this job which, in turn, was her first job

since graduation. Although she had been to a few parties at the

Arsenal the previous spring, it was at this moment very difficult for

her tc physically orient herself. The place was so huge. She could

see a group of low townhouses sitting atop a renovated structure to

the left somewhat over the bridge. Beyond the townhouses hovered

the bulky residence towers of the first of the two major areas of

the project. What would be especially disconcerting, as well as dis-

orienting, she remembered, would the first sight of the two huge

parking structures which would hove into view as she approached

closer.

Just over the bridge, L.C. passed a small marshy field. Then

came the lightly used frontage road along the river. A 'Walk-Dont Walk'

traffic signal blinked her to a stop at this inter-section. The sign

seemed to her out of place in this otherwise pastoral little section.

High grass grew in the marshy plain on her left. The Charles River

flowed past and under the highway bridge. Into the project area

the frontage road twisted and disappeared under tall shade trees and

through low vegetation which crowded the roadside. Although a few

vehicles emerged from the shaded section of frontage road and turned

past her into Arsenal Street, the blinking sign offended L.C. even

thoug it merely reminded her to look both ways before moving on.

Cross she did, however, walking unhurriedly along the blank wall

of the flat brick building supporting the clustered townhouses above.

Although there was a string of windows on this wall, they were of

glass brick and set well above eye level. L.C. would have enjoyed

being able to see some of the Haymarket type of activity which she

had heard was conducted inside this sprawling featureless building.

For the pedestrian, the most prominent display along this facade was

a rusty iron fence about ten feet high, a relic from the days when

the Arsenal was a munitions factory. Even the townhouses above the

brick and glass structure seemed very removed from L.C. and from

anything else at street level. She wondered what it must be like to

live in such an isolated place above the trees, the street, and above

the roads and pathways within the project with whatever hustle and

bustle they might contain.

She walked on, finally reaching a large opening in the iron

fence. A sign chiseled in painted wood hung over the entrance. It

said, "WELCOME TO THE ARSENAL EAST, MAIN GATE". Entering beneath the

sign, she was passed by a number of autos moving in the opposite

direction headed out to Arsenal Street. Very soon, a line of them

backed up when the traffic light at the gate went red. L.C. continued

walking on the left side of this access road. She could see the large

service doors of the indoor market space on her left. Cut up tires

had been fastened together to make bumpers for the loading dock. To

her right, across the access road, loomed the piled layers of the

five story parking structure. Two lide wide openings in the bottom 4 LAW-O.layer swallowed and disgorged vehicles at a rapid pace. ) kkI-J

Looking for a quiet place to cross the road, L.C. walked past

the section teeming with cars leaving and entering the garage and J rwith trucks backing into the loading dock. She came to a part of the itroad which had almost no traffic moving over it. Here she leisurely

walked across to her destination, the large building with the shops

and apartments. She found herself at the head end of a wide path

which passed with several small jogs straight down between the high

towers on the right and the low, row-like clusters of townhouses on

the left. At the end of the footpath, L.C. could see what appeared

to be another parking lot. Along the dark, asphalt path were spread

benches and trashbaskets about twenty or thirty feet apart. They were

in shadows cast by the three-story townhouses on the left. But the

lightly landscaped lawns around the base of the towers to the right

of the walkway glowed gently under the morning sun. As the sun

moved higher, L.C. thought, these shadows would recede, eventually

leaving the path with its benches drenched in brilliant noon sun-

light. It would not be such a comfortable spot to sit and have

lunch, and she hoped that the newly planted trees scattered around

would be able to provide some shade.

She had been told to report at about 9:30 A.M. to a boutique

located somewhere on the third concourse level of the eastern com-

/00

plex of the Arsenal development. The only thing L.C. was certain of

at this point was that she had found the east complex. She stood there

on the paved footpath, faced with five vertical banks of stacked

apartments. Three of the banks rose into imposing towers over the

other two. Not sure of which door to enter, she walked all the way

down the five hundred foot long path to the other end of the huge

building. It would make no difference where she entered the huge

building; she would be lost anywhere. Between the banks of apartments

were layers of reflective glass windows. Centered in the first floor

layer between each bank were a double pair of glass doors. An offshoot

of the main path led to each grouping of doors. As they had all seemed

similar to L.C. on her walk along the building, she simply went to

the most recent bunch of doors she had passed.

This took her into a man-made canyon of high concrete and glass

walls. It surrounded her on three sides. Directly before her, eleven

floors of glass windows and concrete columns rose more than a hundred

feet. On her right, a surface of concrete pricked in a regular

pattern with inset windows rose to a similar height. And on her left,

a similar concrete wall went up about sixty feet. Straight up with

no relief of articulation or setback ascended the walls of the complex.

The height of glass walls before her shielded a black, shadowed

interior as the sun rose higher behind her. It cast deep shadow within

the building and threw blinding sheets of light off the mirror-like

windows.

L.C. entered the monolith. It took her eyes a few seconds to

adjust to the difference between the brilliance of the outdoors and

the fainter incandescent paleness inside. Except for the section of

floor immediately before the glass windows, the hallway was really

quite dark. Here and there ceiling spots picked their way through

into the cool, airconditioned gloom. Turning back for a brief glance

to the trees and benches outside, L.C. felt suddenly trapped within

a very different, if not actually alien, environment.

But business was supposed to come first. The first order of the

day was to get to the boutique before she found herself fired without

having set a foot within the door. There were no signs or dirctories

/0/

to be seen anywhere. Perhaps she should walk down the corridor

looking for some source of information at one of the other entrances.

Paralleling her recent journey outside the building, but traveling

now indoors in the opposite direction, she past various kinds of

stores and a series of secondary corridors. These corridors were

perpendicular to the main one along which she walked. They were

interior extensions of the paths outside which cut off the main path

between the access road and the parking lot. Signs hanging overhead

in the corridor informed L.C. that these left-hand cutoffs led to

the first level of the parking garage. Into her mind came a concept

of this whole place as a grand cycle. She had walked from the auto-

mobiles on the access road off Arsenal Street all the way around and

then back to the very garage from which the autos had emanated and

to which they were destined. The footpaths struch her as merely a

secondary loop, a detour, something like the digressions computer

programs always took during her courses at the University. The loop

spun off from the main thrust of this place which appeared to be

centered in the garage, which was the first building one comprehended

when entering the development. The stores and apartments were only

stops on the secondary loop which traveled right past and through

them on its way back to the main organ, the garage.The stores could

deploy themselves where they could; the loop would take no detours.

It was the garage which shaped the flow of people walking; and where

the people were directed, there the stores and apartments could set

themselves up, accessories to the flow which past them.

L.C. felt she wanted to leave this transportation grid, to get

away from the automobiles, access roads, and parking lots, and from

the main paths, the main corridors, and the cutoff corridors. Finally,

she would like to get away from the feeling that the huge garage was

there sulking behind evrything. To get out of the grid, she had to

step into a vertical extension of it, the elevator. If every concourse

level was similar to this one, she might as well do her walking back

and forth on the right one. L.C. turned baqk to the elevator she had

just passed on her left. Punching the up button, she glanced around

while she waited. A blank wall stared at her from across the main

corridor. It had a little nub-like protrusion which seemed to serve

as a screen for two apartment doors just inside of it. To the left

and right of the protrusion, the blank wall continued about fifteen

feet. Then it met with a painful contrast of light with the floor

to ceiling glass windows. L.C. was forced to turn her eyes away. Just

then, the elevator announced its arrival with a low chime.

She entered the small music-filled compartment and pushed the

button for three. The doors had already shut and now the elevator

acclerated for the brief ascent to the third level. With a wry smile,

L.C. recalled walking along the small marshy field by the river but

a half hour before. She had gone a great distance between there anI

this closed little cubicle now carrying her upwards. The distance

consisted of something more than just the few hundred yards physically

separating the two places.

But there was little difference in distance or atmoshpere between

the first and the third concourse levels. When the elevator doors

glided open, L.C. could have been facing the first level again. It was

as though the elevator had embraced her for thipy seconds, had

whispered sweet nothings of Muzak into her ears, and then had let her

go on her way. Leaving the elevator she wondered which way to turn

down the nearly empty corridor. Nothing indicated to her in which

direction the boutique could be found. Across from the elevator doors

was the same set of screened doorways as on the first level. Only here,

on the third, somewhat less of the floor was illuminated by the sun.

The brilliant white region of the floor was slowly slipping out

through the plate glass windows as the sun rose.

L.C. decided to turn to her left as though to continue the

direction of her first level promenade. Walking slowly down down the

corridor, she watched carefully the shop windows on her left. The

first one she came to was full of shoes. Bright display lights

picked out small reflections on shiny buckles and bright leather.

Corrugated yellow paper formed a backing up to eye level behind the

racks of footwear.Over the backing, L.C. could see a young man in

ties and shirtsleeves arranging low footstools before a line of

wooden arm chairs. Apparently there were no customers at this early

hour. The younq raven-haired man was dressed modishly in a brightly

striped shirt and colorful wide tie. He sported thick side burns below

his temples. On his feet he wore light boots which had a tan sheen of

fine polished leather. She noticed that the boots were of much better

quality than the goods in the window. He must have bought them down-

town. This young man looked interesting to her. She was surprised,

even encouraged, to find such a person employed out here so far from

Boston or Cambridge. As she watched him, he seemed to be arranging

the footstools more according to his own inner sense of artistic

design than by someone else's bidding.

L.C. remembered with a start that she was not her own boss,

however. Unless she got to her job soon, she might not have any.

She continued past the show store along the concourse. Just a few

feet further she at last saw behind the next glass door unmistakable

signs of a boutique in operation. She peered through the door. Lob-

ster traps were hanging from a ceiling which was cut through here and

there by multi-colored spotlights. At the far end of the narrow shop,

a disc with bright colors arrayed on it in triangular wedges revolved

slowly before an angled desk lamp. Chains and trinkets, small ornate

iron crosses, and clay candle holders hung everywhere from the heavy

burlap covering the walls. Along the right hand side of the store

was a glass windowed and topped counter holding still more odds and

ends. Many of them were unidentifiable to L.C. even though she

guessed they mostly consisted of small metallic and glass smoking pipes.

Looking through the glass door, she could see no one moving inside the

shop. But this was not surprising since her new boss could easily be

obscured by some fold of burlap or hanging lobster trap. She reached

out to pull open the aluminum handled door.

"Wait a minute, young lady, the store's not open yet", and a middle-

aged man stepped up and unlocked the door.

L.C. spent the morning with her new employer absorbing numerous

details about the store and its contents. Very few customers came in

during the morning hours. Of them, only one or two had bought anything.

Most of the shoppers she saw wondering around seemed to be housewives

in their thirties or forties. They had pakages from other stores in

their arms when they stopped into the boutique and poked around among

the candles and lobster traps. Assiduously, they kept away from the

pipes under the counter and the iron crosses hanging on the wall.

Promptly at one o'clock her employer departed for lunch at a cafe

on the first floor. Today she was to have lunch, herself, at two,

and stay until 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening. After today, she would

start coming in at noon and working till eight. Wondering how to

spend her lunch hour, L.C. thought she could look at all the stores

on all the levels. But it might be better to spread that out over thedays to come. Today she could investigate the third level and perhapsfind there a bookstore to get something to read during the slower

moments of the day.

Shortly after her employer left, a number of younger men and

women began drifting in small clumps in and out of the boutique.

Seeming to know one another quite well, they made quiet jokes and

remarks as they asked to look at one of the pipes or some other piece

of smoking paraphenalia in the counter. One or two even purchased

some mechanism put together out of odd bits of copper tubing, glass

stems, corks, and old plumbing fixtures. Some of the young people

carried tennis raquets and she guessed that they were employeeslike herself who had found something to do during lunch hour besidesread, eat, or wonder around.

At two, the proprietor of the boutique returned and sent her offto lunch. L.C. went out the door and down the corridor. Taking aquick look out one of the floor to ceiling corridor windows, shesaw the bright day outdoors and she thought about the tennis players.She decided to get a sandwich somewhere and take it outside to eat.Remembering her observations of the morning, she hoped she could finda shady spot to sit down for a few minutes, or perhaps she might goto the tennis courts.

This account will break off here for it has become very difficultto go on with the writing. I have been feeling a growing weight ofeffort over the past few days. It could be that there are no furtherspecific plans to use in order to generate new information which would

/05s

useful and interesting. More and more speculation is being needed to

narrate a realistic account of the shopgirl's working day. For want

of more plans, this speculation would have to subsist on matters

related to her lifestyle as a salegirl, as a recent college graduate,

or merely as a person with some interesting story to tell. But the

intent of this whole exercise is to provide a running check on the

plans already at hand. This exercise is not being undertaken to create

persons for the artistic or paradigmatic purposes of a short story

or novel. If it were being done for those types of reasons, the

evolution and movements of the characters would depend on the inner

needs and drives of the characters, other than just their reactions

to their environment. Therefore, without the substrate of physical

plans or proposals to feed upon, the exercise becomes lifeless. At

least for me. Since I am not engaged in defining or building characters

and situations, only the physical surround for their activities,

further writing about characters comes with difficulty. The work would

be pulled in two diverging directions. For, when the actions of thecharacter no longer have particular relationship or dependence on thesurround, the intent of the thesis goes unanswered. And when the

character's actions have no particular consistency to them otherthan to an environment which can only be guessed at, then the result

will be random and arbitrary writing. Either I should go on witha third character and its relationship with some other aspect still

unexplored in the plans I do have, or get on with the next phase ofthe experiment. The difficulties I having presently writing about thisshopgirl and the pressure of time influence me to go on with the nextphase. That will be to start modifying the existing plans to make

them better fit whatever needs and perceptions have surfaced through

the device of narration.

Conclusion

XVII

It seems now as though we have reached a good point to step

back and sum up where we have gotten so far. A page ago, I described

the frustration I was feeling as I wrote that page about three weeks

ago. As noted, the scenario writing was coming along only with

muc labor and, in my opinion, with very unsatisfying results.

It was unsatisfying because I could not feel as though I were

getting a good "handle" on the character I was writing about. Although

I knew where the story was headed, I could not smoothly and with

further benefit to the thesis get it to go there. L.C. was somehow

supposed to look up after a long day behind the boutique counter

and see Sam's eyes watching her through the window glass. That would

have wrapped up their two vignettes in a neat fashion. Perhaps, also,

the reader would have been given a small jolt with the memory of

what Sam had been up to during his previous moments beneath our

scrutiny. However, all that was not getting me anywhere new as

far as scrutinizing the Arsenal olans wa3 concerned.

Which is not to say that the narrative could not eventually have

gotten somewhere. This experience points out a difficulty with the

"method" technique of narrating a scenario about what a hypothetical

character's life would be like in a hypothetical environment. The

difficulty: it is very hard work if the writer, himself, cannot

somehow directly and personally indentify himself with the person

about whom he is writing. Now, if that person were a real person,

then the task might be easier. But the weight of creating a character

with reasonably believable reactions as well as creating the influences

on his life of elements of the hypothetical environment is really

almost too much. This might imply, then, that the technique would

perhaps work better in those situations where, in fact, flesh and

blood clients were concerned.

There may also be an implication that the "method" technique

would not be particularly suitable where the client was not an indenti-

fiable inhabitant. Unfortunately, that inhibition might preclude

the consideration of many larger types of projects or developments.

On the other hand, if the writer could find or dream up a surrogate

to use for the inhabitant or user, then, conceivably, the writer

would again be in a position to project a scenario. But now we are

back to where we started.

Perhaps I am expecting too much of the process and should be

satisfied with less of a result for a given expense of effort. For

example, although I felt more frustrated while writing about L.C.,

in some "artistic" ways, I felt I was actually able to generate

somewhat more specific and usable information through her part of

the exercise. Perhaps that was because there I did attempt less,

not being so interested in creating a full-scale and complex character

with all sorts of thoughts and perceptions. I think also that I

stuck more to the point with her, especially in the middle part of

the section.

Yet, as a note on the working method, I was constantly pushina

to keep on with the motion of her journey, first to get her to the

site and then to walk her through the structure, itself. When L.C. got

to the boutique where she, of necessity, had to slow down her travels,

then I, for some reason, really felt as though I had run out of

steam. In some ways, the same sort of vaguely frenetic sort of

activity was kept up in Sam's part of the scenario. But there I was

more willing to accept and even to encourage an ebb and flow

quality to the amount of action in the writing. For I was anxious

on the one hand to continue the pace, yet, on the other hand, to

throttle it to a crawl or even a total halt in order to amplify

a detail or fantasy which might have stuck in his mind.

Much of the writing about my house also had a quality of

rapid pace through the purely descriptive passages and then an

easing off during a passage of reminesce. This was done so that

the weight of the descriptive, technical detail would not overwhelm

the reader. And, in its turn, the writing on the detail was supposed

to allow the reader to take a breather from the folksy stuff,

merely retaining a flavor of it to give a perspective on the rest.

But it was difficult to keep up the distinction between the two.

There is little doubt now in my mind that it is very hard to dwell

on an element of hard-won and perhaps painful experience without

letting it begin to run away with itself in some way. This probably

began to happen during the parts on the water diviner and the

installation of electricity, if not in other places as well. For

my own satisfaction, I am glad these sections are included, but it

is questionable whether they were much help in making available

much information which could be used later in interpreting the

Arsenal plans.

And that really was the point: to get to the Arsenal drawings

and change them to make them more suitable to hypothetical inhabi-

tants without having to build and occupy the development just to

generate the possible design innovations. In terms of the overall

structure of the thesis, the bridge between what useful techniques

emerged from dealing with the house plans and memories and then

how these techniques worked or were even used with the Arsenal plans -

that bridge is something mysterious and should be closely examined.

The physical occurrence of the bridge is to be found in the

section about the movie, "Diane". Perhaps a perception offered to

us here is really a key to what this thesis has really turned out to

be. I do not refer, necessarily, to specific comments in the film

relating to the good or bad points of the city versus the countryside,

etc. Except possibly in this way: to expose the question of how,

when, and why one should liberate and mobilize past emotional

experience and perception in order to deal with present circumstance.

Here may be a reference for us to a meaning of the phrase,

"method acting": the building up of a technique which will yield to

the actor's effort all the strengths which can be derived from his

own history of emotional development.

This technique of the persistent actor breaks down into specific

parts to accomplish its goal. Briefly stated, the stages are: to

isolate the characteristic or response to be portrayed in the

role; to search out an analogy to it in your own life; to recall

the emotion you felt then, fleshing out the circumstances if necessary;

finally, to amplify that emotion and inject it into the current role.

These events or steps are not too different from what the

"method designer" would try in order to inject into a given design

effort the qualities earlier referred to as "fitting", "relevant",

"appropriate", etc. Sometimes, such a sequence of thoughts as

implied by using the "method" may be the only way to achieve any

sort of design response. Unfortunately, I can see how, throughout

the thesis, this clear sequence may have gotten confused in its

presentation to the reader. Chronologically, I took the next-to-last

step of the sequence first when I discussed at length the experience

of building the Vermont house. It was not until later in the thesis,

when going through the Arsenal drawings, that an opportunity arose

to use the insights, if any, thus unearthed. Normally, the opportunity

involved would have suggested itself first and only then would the

designer reach back to some specific episode in his personal

experience.

This backwards approach and application of the technique may

be understandable if it is realized that it was not until very

recently that I saw clearly the connection between the two sections,

that memories of the past experience could help in making design

explorations of the current problem. Otherwise, there was good reason

why the house descriptions came before the Arsenal scenarios. For

the technique, itself, of doing the scenarios had to be built up.

It was as though an alphabet had to be formed before the words and

sentences could be constructed.

Now, it is apparent that I ended up in a different place than

where I started. At first, all I wanted to deal with was the technique,

whic I described simply with the phrase, "narrative scenario".

I attempted to build up my skill at writing such things through

writing the house descriptions and recollections of my first years

in Vermont. Then, I applied a narrative technique to the Arsenal

plans, and there ran into all sorts of problems. A good many of them

were literary. For instance, on a simple level, how could one generate

a life-like character and keep him interesting to the reader? More

complicated was the problem of weaving together two motivations

behind the generation of the character which did not want to go

together. One motivation was just stated: to invent and flesh out

a character who was believable. The other motivation was to get that

character to do things and think things which related to and would

be informative about his physical environment. It was not so much

that these criteria for character formation were in direct opposition,

only that the demands of one did not necessarily add anything to

the status of the other.

Then, I went back and wrote, or tried to write, the pages about

the film. These pages were the most difficult to do of all. They

seemed to add an issue which complicated the others which were already

complicated enough. The issue, or dimension, which the movie

suggested was the importance of getting at the personal frame or

viewpoint each of us brings to almost every situation we encounter.

Without such an understanding, or at least a recognition, of how

our pasts are likely to shape our perceptions of the present, we

would be standing on shifting and arbitrary soil.

Much of the content of the film sprang from a conflict between

the influence of the particular personal frame or viewpoint of the

subject, Diane, and the shape of the picture of her present circum-

stances it struggled to contain. The presence of such an obstacle

as the picture of life she brought with her from the hinterland

constituted an element of constant frustration and depression in

Diane's life. This was partly because she had found no way to

overcome or modify it. A shade of hopeless resignation colored her

view of life. She was caught up in some of blockage of any ability

to use her past to come to grips with her present situation.

My thesis, on a somewhat different level of consideration,

would like to convince the designer of physical things that he

seldom need to feel blocked or stifled by his past experience or

lack of it. For he may find a source of competence, power, and

creativity in his past associations and experiences with physical

phenomena. And he can inject perceptions, images, or ideas from these

sources into his present designs and conceptions.

In sum, I feel that my thesis may present an interesting

example of the possible influence this type of inspiration can

have on an ambitious but otherwise useful design program. Appended

on the next several pages is the original statement of goals and cri-

teria I tried to follow as I designed and drew up the first, rela-

tively complete, set of plans. These plans can themselves be found

interleaved throughout the pages of the thesis. The program, itself,

probably provides as good a place as any to begin roughing in the

total or schematic conception of the design. But it gives comparatively

little sense or feeling of what the finished place or environment

could be like in its full, multi-dimensional reality. Perhaps the

program is comparable to a blank sheet in a typewriter with the

writer's outline of subjects to be covered sitting alongside. The

question: how does one turn the called-for framework into a living

and breathing reality, at least in plan? For me, one possible

technique has been the "narrative scenario" which represents merely

one of the possible forms of "method design".

/2

Lawrence Kasser19 December 72 (Appendix, page 105)

ARSENAL HOUSING PRESENTATINit Goals of Design with Some Criteriafor Meeting Those Goals

Goal One: Answer an assumed need for middle and upper income housingwith adequate and attractive dwelling unit designs, keepingin mind the need for compatibility with other facilitieson the site and the need for some sort of modulized formof planning and producing those dwelling units.

Criteria for: Marketability

- range of sizes and plans- some relationship in physical form to other housing- differing degrees and types of privacy- take advantage of natural ammenities of site- take advantage of physical facilities provided on site

6nhancement of other on-site facilities

- dense enough to drav services and clients for commercial- sufficient population to influence mass transit policy- enough units per acre to be economically feasible- provide some regular users of open space- physical form should control and define visual links

between parts of the site and between inside and outside- have an "urban" quality amidst open space

Livability

- private outdoor spaces and public "community" spaces- defining a range of sizes of outdoor community spaces- convenient parking- puncuation and contrast for diversity and identification- related to pedestrian and vehivular circulation- controlled and convenient access to commercial resources

Goal Two: Provide an attractive mix of residential, commercial , municipal,and open space facilities on the site.

- bring people to area- return some tax to community- service basic needs of on-site residents- provide some specialty services or goods for on-site and

off-site clients- relate to and help make strong circulation patterns- entice potential recidents- not to conflict with katertown Square commerce- make use of natural advantages of site- help shane open space and nerception o4 open space

(more)

//3

(Appendix, page 106)

Goal Three: Develop a site plan responsive to the natural featuresof the site, to the needs of on-site and off-site circu-lation, to the possibilities of growth of various facilities,and which speaks to some overall goals of open spaceplanning in an urban region.

- maintain and extend green-space linkage with areas aboveand below on the Charles giver

- deal with the use of the open space the site makes avail-able, not just the amount

- control, intensify, and variegate relationships with theriver

- exploit natural toDogranhical features wherever possible- provide for some specific recreational needs of some

groups or individuals- control and defive visibility of the open space and its

uses, from both va-.tage points inside the site and outside,icluding from roads

- develop one or more intensive use "playground" areas- develop useful and controled links with residential and

coms.ercial areas- develop screens between facilities and open space areas

Goal Four: Use as much existing rtructure as possible.

- haintain and/or rennovate existing buildings- Use foundations and slabs where possible- explore uses of unusual structures such as craneways,

ramps, etc.

Goal Five: Develop a set of drawings which communicate in a condensedfashion as many responses to the above goals as possible.